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Posted: October 1, 2025

Cartographies of Skin and Soil: Tattoos, Resistance, and Colonial Maps of the Philippines

To mark 50 years of Philippine Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Hamilton Library’s Philippine Studies Collection presents:

Cartographies of Skin and Soil: Tattoos, Resistance, and 1500s Colonial Maps of the Philippines Workshop and Exhibit

Discover how Filipinos have long marked memory and resisted erasure through traditional tattoos, archival materials, and rare 1500s Philippine maps—stories preserved in the Philippine Rare Collection.

Event Highlights

  • Traditional Tattoos in the Boxer Codex – explore tattoos as archives of ancestral knowledge and cultural memory.
  • Philippine Revolutionary Papers – learn the Ilokanos’ role in Philippine independence.
  • 16th–18th century maps – including the Philippines’ first solo map and more.
  • The Martial Law Papers – over 16,000 pages documenting underground resistance to the Marcos regime.

Workshop

  • October 15 (5:30–6:30 PM)
  • October 16 (3:00–5:30 PM)

Space is limited. Register here.

Exhibit

  • October 15 – December 5
  • Hamilton Library, 4th Floor, Asia Reading Room

This project is supported by the UH Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), which funded the acquisition of significant historical maps for the Philippine Map Collection.