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Kathleen Solon-Villaneza, Global Educators Network, Inc., ThailandAbstract
GAMUT identifies and explores the trees and vegetation of the Solon House post-World War II. The Solon House refers to family, architecture, and estate deeply rooted in Mabolo, a village in Cebu City, the Philippines. Maps (historical, DENR cadastral, and subdivision survey plans), legal documents, and old photographs help locate and support the study. The Quantum GIS application is utilized to map the trees and vegetation across generations. Rooted in autoethnography and phenomenology, the researcher’s own experiences, together with the lived experience narratives of family members, are collected and thematically coded to extract recurring vegetal metaphors. Trees and vegetation are active participants in memory and meaning-making. For example, a dakit tree planted sometime in the 1940s as a boundary marker kept alive the folklore of ada (engkanto) from the ancestors to descendants’ own lived experiences. The paper also explores the Cebuano word gamut, its metaphorical essence, and relationships with words in Filipino and English, informing the significance of vernacular language heritage. Apart from serving as one of four vital articles for the family’s second book project, the paper also informs Filipino notions of kinship and place, as well as plant humanities in Southeast Asia.
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Conference: KAMC2025Stream: Difference/Identity/Ethnicity
This paper is part of the KAMC2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Solon-Villaneza K. (2026) GAMUT: The Spatial and Generational Mapping of Trees and Vegetation of the Solon House ISSN: 2436-0503 – The Kyoto Conference on Arts, Media & Culture 2025: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 607-620) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2436-0503.2025.49
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2436-0503.2025.49
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