Resilience as remembering: temporality, memory and compounding crises in Mindanao

Current conceptualisations of compounding crises often frame it as the convergence of large-scale contemporary disruptions – particularly climate change and violent conflict – occurring simultaneously. While valuable, these framings often neglect the temporal depth of crisis, overlooking how shocks accumulate as structural violence and neglect over generations. This paper introduces a temporal understanding of compounding crises as the historical layering of material dispossession, resource scarcity, political marginalisation, violent conflict, and ecological degradation. Building on this, resilience is reconceptualised not merely as recovery from singular shocks, but as a dual capacity: first, to adapt to long-term disruptions and endure; and second, to bear and transmit the memory of these crises across generations. Drawing from intergenerational storytelling and ethnographic vignettes in a rural village in Northern Mindanao, the paper reframes resilience as both material persistence and narrative continuity. Here, stories of endurance become emotional and strategic resources. Resilience is thus inherently intergenerational, shaped by the ability of younger generations to receive, recognise, and reinterpret inherited memories – transforming survival into an act of remembering, meaning-making, and future-making. This study situates resilience within the longue durée of Mindanao’s colonial and postcolonial histories, combining autoethnography and intergenerational storytelling to foreground memory as both resource and burden.