In Enigmatic Objects: Notes Towards a History of the Museum in the Philippines (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2023), National Artist for Literature Resil B. Mojares offers a thoughtful and absorbing meditation on the origins of collecting in the Philippines. Organized like a cabinet of curiosities, the book assembles stories of portraits, phrenological skulls, coconut-shell teapots, and other artifacts that once filled the private gabinetes of the Spanish era and later shaped the first public museums under American rule. Mojares shows how these objects were more than curiosities; they were markers of prestige, instruments of imperial knowledge, and building blocks in the fragile project of national identity. His writing moves carefully between anecdote and analysis, sketching a vivid portrait of how Filipinos, long before the word “museum” became commonplace, were already arranging and interpreting the material world around them. Enigmatic Objects is an elegant and quietly provocative work, offering readers a fresh way of seeing the past through the objects that have survived it.

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Resil B. Mojares. Enigmatic Objects: Notes towards a History of the Museum in the Philippines. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2023.