Early Filipino-Spanish encounters in the sixteenth century were bloody affairs—literally and symbolically. Blood was shed in warfare, but also shared in ritual. This talk examines the early colonial history of the sandugo, or blood compact—an Indigenous ritual of friend-making in the Philippines that involved the exchange of blood, particularly through ingestion. Performed at least two dozen times between Indigenous Filipino leaders and Spanish empire builders during the first century of Spanish presence, the blood compact was repurposed to serve both sides of the encounter to divergent ends. 

As a cross-ethnic, pan-archipelagic institution, the sandugo can be understood as an affective arrangement of friendship characterized by intimacy, reciprocity, and symbolic union. Spaniards, however, gradually appropriated the ritual and subordinated it to their notarized agreements—a crucial apparatus of their contractual colonialism—which asserted colonial authority and erased Indigenous modes of negotiation. This talk explores how blood compacts became not only tools of negotiation, domination, and resistance but also key motifs in Spanish chronicles that sought to legitimize conquest through narratives of native consent and alleged betrayal. By centering friendship as a political and affective concept, the talk reconsiders the entangled roles of ritual, treaty, and violence in the making of empire and reveals how the sandugo embodied both imperial desire and anti-colonial subterfuge. 

 

Arthit Jiamrattanyoo received his PhD in Southeast Asian history from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2022. His doctoral dissertation, “Conquest of Amity: Affective Politics and Cultures of Friendship in the Spanish Colonization of the Philippines, 1521-1762,” examines the ways in which various types of friendship were forged in the contexts of colonial contact, domination, endurance, and resistance between Philippine natives and Spaniards from the early sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. He has also been writing about modern social types or figures of modernity in Thai history, such as the overseas student, the flâneur, and the socialite, drawing on theoretical perspectives and analytical frameworks from various fields including postcolonialism, sensory humanities, and periodical studies.