Introduction presenta sxtcenth-century Philippine ethnography based on cantemporancous sources doer not atempt to reconstruct that by tonsideraon of present Philippine saetes, or of eatires tiond to be common to il autronctan peoples, Nor doct it seck Slniies wi neigiboring cultures in Souicast Asia though the raw ards actually say about, joped that the answer ino readers today to pay a vicarious visit to ur centuries ago. History texts in use in the Philippine school system generally include a chapter on pre-Hispanic society and culture derived from five main sources English in the monumental Blair and Robertson compendium. ions, The Philippine Itands 1493-1898: hese are Antonio Pigafetta’s of the Magellan voyage, Miguel de Loarca's 1582 Relacién, Juan 's 1589 treatises on custom law and rel i they also make use oftwo twentieth-century forgeries awit ted © shtcenthcentary Diego Povedano and nineteenth-century Jorg IJntrodcion Marfa Pavén, and insepresent Pedro A. Monteclaro’s 1907 Maratas ag : pectispani doc rrefjocuments may be added four other ‘Fo the authentic agen voyage anda doen fom the othe Mans, The 1526 Loaysa expedition touched on the east ees {598, Four accounts, one of them running to a hundred pages, hare survived from the Ruy Lépet de Villalobos expedition, which spent eight en months in Sarangani, Mindanao, Leyte, and Samar in 1642-1549, eng ‘eumnaigated both Mindanao and Samar. From the Miguel Lépes ad tiga 1565 expedition which established the Spanish colony, exec, deuiled sisteen-month journal, separate reports of local products and tastoms,and a eam of missionary and conquistador correspondence, An} from the next century comes Francisco Alcina’s unpublished fourvolume Historia dls sas Indios de Bisayas, which is invaluable both foritsauthors descriptions of material culture’ and his attempt to reconstruct pre Hispanic Visayan society by interviewing the oldest residents. Much information can also be gleaned through what T have called “racks inthe parchment curtain” in an earlier essay—‘chinks,s0 10 speak, through which Neting glimpses of Filipinos and their reactions to Spanish dominion may be seen . .. unintentional and merely incidental to the purpose ofthe documents” (Scott 1982, 1). A peace pact between Magellan's survivors and a ruler in Palawan, for example, indicates that it was trans lated by a Spanish-speaking Makassarese slave seized from a royal Luzon tessel in Borneo. Court proceedings against backsliding Mai le & description of a Muslim burial, and notarized testimonies by ipino chiefs reveal that few of them could sign their names. Tagalog sermons by friar missionaries mention deities otherwise unknown, refer 10 the number of days slave is expected to work for his master, and inveigh against the vanity of tooth filing and eyebrow shaving. But by far the richest sources of information on Fi ate the carly seventeenth-century Spanish dictionaries of Philippine an- Siages. By their very nature, dictionaries contain more information Ut ae ‘lteatue or documentation. ore ce on ‘olony were compiled by missionaries for the use of othes “l dae, it definitions may be incorrect but they would not be d ier noon 8 The Sincher Samarefio dictionary gives the phases of 1. 2 ge day of the month; the Lisboa Bikolano dictionary def" the parts of the backstrap loom; the Méntri 1on dictionary OF tains the most 'P loom; the Méntrida Hiligayn« d the Sam extensive glossary of seafaring terms. Am eyewitness accounts of the Me artySpanish Introduction Buenaventura Tagalog dictionary includes ethnographic data foun none of the accounts—details of technology and industry, comme! contracts and interest rates, head taking and puberty rites, jar burial and. sexual mores. ‘Naturally, these sources must be used critically. Dictionary definitions are often tantalizingly brief, and the absence of a particular term may reflect the lexicographer's limitations rather than the nonexistence of the concept. Comments on Filipino ethics and morality are hopelessly skewed by Spanish ethnocentricity and the reactions of aliens caught in the grip of culture shock. On the other hand, missionary reports intended for European audiences are often distorted by the desire to prevent converts from appearing like naked savages. Reports to the king on products and industries suitable for colonial exploitation are obviously more reliable than those recounting Filipino belligerence and treachery which might excuse conquistador brutality. Information on native religion is especially problematic. Direct questions about God, creation, the Flood, the human soul, heaven and hell, regularly produced obliging answers contrary to actual cult practices. In this ethnography, therefore, all descriptions will be based on a synthesis ofall the sources available; no data will be presented unless they accord with that synthesis, Moreover, with few exceptions, they derived from primary sources in their original languages, no secondary sources or Uandatons Sina Taneeages, not Regrettably, these sources contain two significant lacunae—lack of stax tistics and failure to cover the whole archipelago. Vital statistics are com. pletely wanting, as well as fig. il i ures on production and distribution whic! would permitan estimate of Fil imposion jal U should ao be noted thatthe PI unchanged during the cencury A Male ate in Maguindanao, Bru if n yecame vegarded as mills and draft animals, were all_ Introducing __, gxteenth-century sources, there happen t sunivng Sra culture than on the Fest of the yoluminous eas paniards were the Visayas fifty years before the combined Pr recorded their observation: tae sien in fondest sand of base wusiasm, © be mo Philippine, ey reached, ippine society and culture, "Tanuneren distibution of data has suggested the plan ofthis book. Pay: 1 describes Viayan culture in eight chapters on physical appearan dn aming tes and commerce rel rural science, socal organization, tiachipeng fom south to north-Mindanao, Pangasinan, locos, Igorot, and Cagayan. With the sociey, these secons contain only brief notices due thu or because there is no need to repeat features already di lescribed at length in part 1. An afterword has been added to examine the survival of sxteenthcentury minorities. And a bibliographic essay locates and de scribes the book's sources. The Word “Barangay” Barangay, or balangay, was one of the first native words the Spaniards learned in the ines. When Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan's Talia, ‘expeditionary ethnographer, went ashore to parley with the ruler Limasava, they sat together in a boat drawn up on shor (5%, 8 P he same meaning, in all the major languag Spanish dictionaries make it clear that some "ered he wat vel ne pons Se soap the same since I oddity gave birth in 1976, with the arc 4 Iso worth noting hat Pigafett® ora whieh, ofc" ces of the Philip was pro” yund. Uni nacological Introduction ee ized Philippine term, iscovery of an ancient boat in Butuan, to a bastardized PI n “range has gained popular currency though no such word is known in any Philippine language. | . Fe TE ony fund i wad obs being used for the smallest political unit of Tagalog society. Franciscan friar Juan de Plasencia (1589a, 28v) described it as follows: andeven J were chiefeofbutfew people, as manyasa hundred houses ‘and this they callin Tagalog, barangay. And what was inferred from their being called this was because, since these are known from their language to be Malayos, when they came to this land, the head of barangay was taken. {fora dats, and even today itis still ascertained that one whole barangay was originally ‘one family of parents and children, slaves and relatives? and legitimized its captain’s claim to personal allegiance. ‘These two meanings of the word barangay all attention to two important characteristics ofthe sixteenth-century Philippines not characteristic of the localized government. -refore not an inappropriate title for a book about Philip- ture in the sixteenth century. of sparse populations inhabiting the interior moun- -nth-century Filipinos lived on the seacoast or the and streams. Their only means of transportation 19 evidence of wheeled vehicles or draft animals, ‘Traders and raiders, friends and foes crossed from one side of a river to the other by boar, from island to island, and between island. Communities were connected, not separated, by water: it was by Water that they exchanged foodstufs, manufactured wares, and foreign imports, The eventual clearing off of interior forests and the opening of new land to the plow and population expansion may be seen as an eman. ipation from the limi the older boat culture. But the new is, on an overland road system periodi- ition of bridges across waterways that were hhannels for the movement of people, "Barangay" is, pine society and tant ports on the sameIntreduction The Filipino People cg a ite cpg eee eee ees re detec epee ee tS pine populations, there these were subjective comments d value judgments and the fact that Spaniards themselves varied greatly in complexion and stature, As an early Tagalog dictionary says of the word cayomangi, “There are some ” (Blancas de San José 1610, 10s by their languages, the by their tattoos, and highlanders as primitive. And they did not. include those they called negros or negrilis (blacks or “litle blacks,” that is, Negritos) under the rubric of indio at all. Negritos obviously belonged to a different race from the rest of the Filipino people, though observed variations in pigmentation and stature suggested considerable intermarriage with non-Negritos. Spaniards were also inclined to refer to Muslim Filipinos—Moros—as a separate race, unfortunate equation of race, language, and religion which persists in popular prejudice even today. Christian Fi nonexistent “Moro language,” and the Taosug Muslims in Sulu fondly recall their ancestors as Arabs rather than Filipino converts. The king of Spain, however, knew better. Mordered that his indio subjects who were converts to Islam should not be enslaved like Moro invaders and preachers from outside the colony. ‘The Spaniards also recognized the Chinese as another race—like the political refugees they found settled on the Tondo waterfront and Mat environs. Spanish failure to mention any Chinese trading colonies, excep for one dubious reference to Chinese men and women in Vigan, comes as 8 surprise, considering their sanguine interest in China as a commercial been unable co recog: and missionary target. Of course, they woul. nize any descendants of Chinese who dressed like only to mean people who spoke Chinese and practiced Chinese customs. Tehas often been averred that the Spaniards found highland and low- land Filipinos in a state of traditional enmity when they arrived. But the 8 jinos frequently refer toa Introduction always involve independent tribes on the one hand, and i ;paniards did report on their Miguel de Loarca's 1 mutual trade: twas '582 Relacién ‘There are two kinds of men in this land [Panay} who, though they are all one, always eneries—the one, those who live he mountains, andif they have some ity they have of one another to sustain human life, cause those of the mountains cannot lv without the fish and salt and ‘other things and jars and plates which come from other parts, nor can those on the Perhaps—they speculated—they were also aborigines who withdrew in the face of later migrations; or they may have been a mixture of civilized and uncivilized wibes, or even the descendants of shipwrecked Japanese seafarers. But they were agreed that the lowland population came from Malayspeaking islands to the south, and they accounted for the variety of Philippine languages accordingly—for example, Tagalogs from Borneo, Kapampangans from Sumatra, or Visayans from Makassar. These is were based on observed similarities between Malay and anguages, similarities arising from the fact that both Malay and 1e languages are members of the great Austronesian family of he Su (now Djam ‘expansive political power. Speakers of this language the wading pors fn the ara professional interpretersor members of the ruling fami Sumatran slave spoke to the ruler of Limasawa, trading center of Butuan, “the king understood him," Pigafetta , 14) said, because in those parts the kings know more languages than the other people.” And because of Manila’s Bornean connections, Tagalog today has more Malay loan words than any of the other major Philippine tanguages. Indeed, it seems that the Manila elite were speaking Malay as a 9Introduction —_ —— second anguagein he secca centr. Tt no doubt yy esi ra ld toe deve of Maly. ot ana Gilet fat aE od to mean people ofthe same physical ype anna ere sya eotspeak iat language thenares Se 2 aon Bhmentet sed tin aor eamy eee the Fipino people rom thre waves of Maloy ge lint wave, he theoraed. diplseer tains, and became the progenitors population; and the third wave introduced Islam, was not the only modern ethnologist who proposed a series of serete migrations to account for the island populations of South- cast Asia,nor would he be the last. In the twentieth century, H. Otley Beyer ‘may well be said to have surpassed them all with the grandeur of a wave migration theory which is known to every literate Filipino today. The Beyer Wave Migration Theory ‘The wellknown theory was produced by Beyer, then head of the Anthro- pology Department of the University of the Philippines, for th Census, to explain the physical and cultural variations among the People. The physical differences he attributed to genetic comm! among a series of migrating peoples of unlike racial type, and cultural Aiferences presumed to be precolonial—tike tools and weapons, food crops and agriculture—he assigned to these different waves, At the time, oarchacological fieldwork had been dot himself who would pioneer that field in Age sites in Novaiches. During the next ewe tite and artifact recovered 10 one of the waves, and placed the waves Since he congaihtonelogical sequence from primitive to advanced. And made eheni nated any similarity between Philippine finds and those ere in Asia to be evidence of migrations rather than culture ofwaves steadily multiplied, By 1958 they had reached Fisteane unt de Beyer's own terminology, they were as follows: ners poe ncnitiren then the “little people”—Australoid Sakai, enh ae} —followed by wo waves of Indonesians—TYPe (Norther taller wave of Papuans, who were succeeded in turn nand Southern Malay waves, and finally the Jar Burial with the discovery of Stone nty years, he assigned every by separat 10 Introduction People. To these were added two peoples from nineteenth-century folk- lore—the Orang Dampuan in Sulu, and the Ten Datus of Borneo said to have purchased Panay Island from native Negritos. Each provided with a point of origin, credited with described in physical detail. Migrants of the first since submerged, but later ones came from China, Vietnam, Borneo, and the Celebes in dugout canoes or plank-built boats. The ProtoMalays car- ried blowguns, bows and arrows; the Northern Malays introduced bronze and rice terraces; and the Southern Malays were blacksmiths, weavers, and sped; and Southern Malays were tattooed. All ‘an imaginative and comprehensive synthesis. But it was also by litde evidence, dubious methodology, and simple fantasy. tal remains to determine human stature; prehistorians are persuaded of the antiquity of trade contacts in Southeast Asia; and linguists believe that people speaking Philippine languages were living in the archipelago thousands of years ago. Probably none of them would accept Beyer’s assumption that by examining living populations you can determine what kind of tools their ancestors used, or that by examining tools you can determine the race of the men who made them. Beyer also gave little consideration to the fact that cultures are dynamic, not static, that they yh change, adjustment, innovation, development, and bor- rowing. Thus the fact that Filipinos in Manila eat McDonald's hamburgers but those in Bontoc do not does not require one more wave migration to explain it. Itis probably safe to say that no anthropologist accepts the Beyer Wave Migration Theory today.* Most prehistorians today only postulate two movements of people into the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific to account for the present Populations, The first they call Australoid, people whose surviving repre- sentatives are generally characterized by very dark pigmentation. Philip- pine Negritos are considered to be a specialized physical variation of this, Stock, The second movement is thought to have begun some five or six have largely displaced or absorbed the earlier \er it reached the Philippines from the north or being debated with some heat. These people are known to anthropologists as Southern Mongoloid and to laymen as the n_ tet but are also called Austronesian because their descendants, that family. The physical types which an pologists provided with a long list of racial and garded as genetic specializations within the brown race, ° speak languages belonging lier generation of anthroy ial names are now Fe arrange of variations ofthe larger movement. Moreover, many of Te have continued to move from island to island up into historic ths oP igraon waves but as small groups of setler, traders, or fasawaye, All of them would have contributed to local gene pools, but those new genes would not have carried language skills or tool-making techniques.” pigmentation, and facial features, though it is not now possible to identify theee differences. Settlement and intermarriage in small communities would cause such genetic traits, as well as those of any strangers marrying in from outside, to be shared by an increasing portion of the population in each generation. Thus inhabitants of a whole valley might come to cexhibita kind of family resemblance, and even to be regarded by outsiders as a separate race. Conversely, many such differences are not genetically significant: It is a common observation thi giene, younger generations are taller than elderly Igorots often develop enlarged first toes, and so do Tagalog boat ‘men who pole barges walking barefoot along bamboo runways, but their children are not born with this deformity.* Philippine Languages Philippine languages belong to the Austronesian language family, @ ‘huge group of more than six hundred languages spread from Madagascar ‘off the coast of Africa in the west to Easter Island off the coast of South Tanguages, like the cultures of which they are i; their vocabularies, grammar, and pronun- i changing. When two speech communities diverge ‘until they are recognizably different but can still understand each other, they are said to speak two dialects of the same language; but if they diverge touch an extent that they cannot understand each other, they constitute ‘wo separate languages. Thus, for example, Banaue and Kiangan are WO 12 Introduction but Ifugao and Tagalog are two different languages, iible. In time, the mother tongue from which daughter dialects and languagesare derived will disappear, but linguists can theoreti- cally reconstruct such extinct protolanguages by comparing the similarities Seaen delving languages which are descended from them. ese similarities are accounted for in two ways—outright borrowing from ater languages, or inhentance fom comment spect sock ‘Terms are often borrowed to accompany new cultural introductions—like Malay kuda for horse in Manobo and T'boli, or Spanish caballo (that is, ‘abaye) in Tagalog, Hlocano, and Visayan. Or they may reflect the prestige i held. So Malay binibini (female) was taken (Gather) lich appears in many Austronesian lan- guages. Linguists secking the relationship of sister languages therefore ‘compare a basic vocabulary of concepis like sun and moon, nose and hair, and up and down, which would presumably be common to any human society. From this exercise, they are able to construct a family tree which shows the relationship of the languages belonging to the family as a kind of genealogy. ‘Onan Austronesian language tree produced by this method, Philippine languages are found on the lowest branches, meaning to say that ‘Austronesian languages were being spoken in the archipelago earlier than in places like the Malay Peninsula or the Pacific Islands. By the time of Spanish advent, Austronesian speakers had occupied the whole archi- pelago, absorbing or displacing the sparse populations already present, as their original tongue diversified into three main branches: A northern only Visayan but all the languages between Pampanga an as Taosug in Sulu, In addition, a nonPhilippine Austronesian language had entered with a boat people the Spaniards called Lutaw or Lutaya, and di nto the Sama Badjaw languages. With this exception, however, pine languages have more in common with one another than any vem does with a language outside the Philippines. This means that ntury were speaking roduced by separate migrations from abroad.*Introduction ‘A Word about Orthography Spanish orthography confuses band v, and non-Castilians confuse sand spines appears both as Bisaya and as Vizaya; Vigan, and Legazpl's name was often spelled “Legaspi.” The Spanish alphabet had no wor ng (so Father Chirino omitted is Philippine alphabet); thus Dr. Morga spelled timawa, id g were pronounced as separate consonants, “timagua’y an Pangasinan (land of salt) came to be pronounced “Pang-ga-si-nan.” In. Pampanga) is now spelled and ich was always spelled “balangay” in Tagalog dictionaries, is now pronounced “ba-rang-gay.” In citing Philippine terms from Spanish dictionaries, I have respelled them in accordance with normal Philippine usage. Thus I have changed ¢ and gu to has appropriate, and gui to gi, replaced u with wand é with before or after vowels, and doubled the g of ng where necessary—as in fayumanggi for cayomangi. But [have been unable to solve the problems of wand ¢,and eand i being used inconsistently even in the same lexicon, or the fact that some dialects have Z where others have r, and that 7 is sometimes a variant of d. For Tagalog, however, I have simply adopted the conventional modern spelling.