by E. Garzilli

One year and two months ago this night, I put my fingers on this laptop keyboard and sent a test cybermessage to Ludovico, our Technical Editor, and to Prof. Michael Witzel, with whom I had talked about this journal. After their reply I announced the birth of the JSAWS to cyberspace.

My message was sent by [email protected] on Sunday October 1, 1995 at 7:58:29 p.m. We received our first "subscribe" message on Sunday, October 1, 1995 at 8:33:54 p.m. from [email protected]. Soon after that, John at the Department of Philosophy in Singapore, Mikael from the SOAS at the University of London, Asim from the University of Tasmania, Angelina from the USA, Jennifer from the University of North Carolina, Jensine from the USA, Durba from Berkeley University in California, Mimi from the University of Hawaii, Mark from Cornell University, Jennifer from the University of Miami, Heidi from the University of London, Maria from the University of Heidelberg, Rebecca from the C.N.R. in Rome, and many, many others came... It was so exciting and scary. I felt so responsible.

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Now our membership stands at 301 individual and listserver subscribers. The last ones are 6 and redistribute our issues to the subscribers of several mailing lists all over the world. Our WWW home page has more than 2,100 accesses per month.

Thank you for subscribing, for keeping in touch with each other with the Directory Email Book (DEB), for voting for us at the "Best of 1995 Social Sciences, Humanities & Asian-Pacific Studies WWW Resources", for submitting papers, books for reviews, questions, news, and announcements.

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In this issue we will publish the paper From 'Baylan' to 'Bruha': Hispanic Impact on the Animist Priestess in the Philippines by Carolyn Brewer. Ms. Brewer is a Ph.D. candidate in Asian Studies at Murdoch University, Australia.

In the Philippines, at the time of the Spanish conquest, Catholic priests were instructed by Bishop Salazar to learn and preach in the languages of the inhabitants. However, certain clusters of words, especially those involving animist priestesses were altered, negated and then marginalized almost to extinction. This movement paralleled the demonization and eventual disappearance of the priestesses from historical texts.

The paper aims to:

1. describe the process involved in this double negation;
2. recover the forgotten words;
3. restore Animist priestesses to their rightful place in Philippine history.

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As already announced, the collected JSAWS 1995-1996 issues also containing the papers delivered at the Dowry and Bride-burning International Conferences' will be printed and distributed as books in about a month. As soon as we have the first copy ready we will give you the full details and price.

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I want to thank Carlos Lopez, PhD candidate at Harvard University and our Assistant Editor, and Dr. Ludovico Magnocavallo, architect, Systems Engineer in an international company and our Technical Editor. They have worked -- unpaid like all of us! -- with commitment and enthusiasm to make all this possible.

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This journal is fully protected by Copyright regulations. Please note the new Copyright notice at the end of every issue.

If you want to submit papers, reviews, books for review, news items, suggestions, etc., please send them to:

[email protected]
or
[email protected]