14/11/2025
Dr. Rosita G. Leong School of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, invites you to the public Final Oral Defense of the Master's thesis entitled:
"Butil, Galawan, at Kargahan: The Language of Experiential Realities in a Community Living with Drugs"
By: Mr. Yuan Gabriel R. Reyes
Master of Arts in Anthropology Candidate
Venue, Date, and Time:
2F Old Communications Building, November 14, 2025, Friday, 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Adviser:
Jose Jowel P. Canuaday, PhD
Panelists:
Eufracio Abaya, PhD
Ateneo de Manila University
John Martin Gappy, PhD
Ateneo de Manila University
ABSTRACT:
This work examines how language mediates the lived realities of a community living with drugs in a barangay in Metro Manila. It approaches speech, lexicon, and everyday discourse as sites where ambivalence takes material and linguistic form. Drawing on the concepts of ambivalent materiality, argot, and the drug dispositif, the study explores how prohibitive institutions and local vocabularies interact to shape how drugs, users, and moralities are understood. Through co-creative ethnographic methods that combine fieldwork, photovoice, and cultural animation, the research listens to people whose voices are often excluded from policy and academic discourse, framing them as experts of their own lived experience. Findings reveal that within an expanding prohibitive drug dispositif, language functions both as an apparatus of restriction and a resource of defiance. Words such as adik (addict), masamang adik (bad addict), butil (grain), galawan (movement), kargahan (planting of evidence), and sumisistema (participation in the system) articulate alternative moral logics, relational responsibilities, and strategies for navigating precarity amid surveillance and criminalization. Ultimately, the study argues that ambivalence is not simply indecision but a way of living and speaking through contradictionโwhere danger and necessity, prohibition and participation, coexist and are continuously negotiated in everyday life. By attending to these linguistic negotiations, the thesis offers an account of how people sustain life, meaning, and relation within and against the apparatuses that seek to define them.
Join us via Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/ReyesDefense
