An Ethnography

A couple weeks ago, I accompanied my friend, Pala Agustin, for a day of work at

her family’s restaurant, Banig. To be quite honest, I was not expecting to learn as many

things as I did learn on that trip. Firstly, I was expecting to learn more about the fast food

and food service culture, but to my surprise I learned more about the culture of the people

who owned the restaurant. Being a close friend of Pala’s I had an emic perspective in the

whole experience; Pala was my key respondent. Through her, I learned a great deal about

why each role was assigned to each person at the restaurant, the hierarchy of the different

members of the family in the restaurant, and why the restaurant has such peculiar hours

of operation.

To begin with, I asked Pala about her ethnicity and racial background. She herself

was born in the capital of the Philippines, Manila. Her family, however, did not live in

Manila, but traveled there to birth Pala and her siblings because that is where the “most

advanced medical technology in the country could be found,” Pala informed me. “My

mother has always been cautious about things like this, I think she might even be a bit

over cautious. But I guess it just shows how much she and my dad love my and my

siblings,” Pala explained to me. She then described how there would be much less

complication and a much higher chance of survival if she was born in an actual hospital

rather than in her house, which in some of the poorest parts of the country is not

uncommon, she mentioned. “Family is the most important thing to Filipinos. There is

nothing we treasure more than our family. “We’d give out lives for each other if we had

to” Pala’s mother, May Agustin said during a group interview. The rest of the family

seemed to concur. As she said it, everyone nodded his or her head in concord. The