Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society PDF

C A R A G A STATe U NIVeRSITy Ampayon, Butuan City 8600, Philippines URL: www.carsu.edu.ph BARANGAY: SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILIPPINE CULTURE AND SOCIETY BY WILLIAM HENRY SCOTT 1 WILLIAM HENRY SCOTT  William Henry Sc...

C A R A G A STATe U NIVeRSITy Ampayon, Butuan City 8600, Philippines URL: www.carsu.edu.ph BARANGAY: SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILIPPINE CULTURE AND SOCIETY BY WILLIAM HENRY SCOTT 1 WILLIAM HENRY SCOTT  William Henry Scott born in Detroit, Michigan, US and arrived in the Philippines as a missionary-teacher of the Episcopal Church (Anglican) at St. Mary’s School in Sagada, Mt. Province in 1954 where he served as a teacher and the school principal for many years 2  Scott’s assignment in Sagada started his long journey of teaching and writing history of pre-colonial Philippines and various topics on Cordillera history and culture  Some of William Henry Scott’s works provides better understanding of the tribal groups of Cordillera 3  In 1965, Scott enrolled at the University of Santo Tomas for his doctoral studies, focusing on pre-colonial history.  It was during this time that he examined the Code of Kalantiaw and found it to be the most deliberate fabrication.  This became his dissertation which he successfully defended on 16 of June 1968 before an esteemed panel. 4  His panelists were Tedoro Agoncillo, Horacio de la Costa, Marcelino Foronda, Mercedes Grau Santamaria, Nicolas Zafra, and Gregorio Zaide.  His dissertation became the basis of his book, Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History 5  In his dissertation, he concluded that there is no evidence that Kalantiaw existed, and that the Kalantiaw Code was a creation of Jose Marco.  In 2004, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines – then the National Historical Institute – released Board Resolution No. 12 declaring that the Code of Kalantiaw/Kalantiao has no valid historical basis. 6  The book, Reflections on Philippine Culture and Society: Festschrift in Honor of William Henry Scott’s scholarship with over 240 titles of social and cultural history and anthropological studies.  Linguist and anthropologist Dr. Nicole Revel writes about Scott’s scholarship: “As a historian, Dr. Scott worked not only on archives but also on oral traditions, with an acute sense for material culture and was never neglectful of any of the detailed prized by ethnographers.” 7  The sources contain two significant lacunae (,issing portion in a book): 1. lack of statistics 2. failure to cover the whole archipelago  Vital statistics are figures on production and distribution which would permit an estimate Filipino living standards before the imposition of colonial burdens. 8  Failure to cover the whole archipelago since there was a little information on the people of northern Luzon, and none at all on the Mindanao and Sulu sultanates, which the Spaniards did not visit in the sixteenth century except for military attacks.  The Spaniards were in Visayan fifty years before they reached Luzon, and they recorded their observation. 9  BARANGAY  Barangay or balangay, was one of the first native words the Spaniards learned in the Philippines  When Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s Italian expeditionary ethnographer, went ashore to parley with the ruler of Limasawa, they sat together in a boat drawn up on shore which Pigafetta called a balanghai 10  When the Spaniards reached Luzon, they found this word for boat also being used for the smallest political unit of Tagalog society.  These two meanings of the word barangay call attention to two important characteristics of the sixteenth-century Philippines – dependence on boats and highly localized government 11  Filipino lived on the seacoast or the banks of navigate lakes and streams and their only means of transportation were boats: there is no evidence of wheeled vehicles or draft animals.  Communities were connected, not separated, by water: it was by water that they exchanged foodstuffs, manufactured wares, and foreign imports 12  A tagalog barangay was a group of people ruled over by one datu.  It was to him they owed allegiance, not to a municipal, provincial, tribal or national government.  Datus joined their barangays in common communities, reckoning precedence and making alliances among themselves. 13  It should be noted, that the word barangay mean the people, not the place.  Up to the end of Spanish regime, baptismal registers identified nonelite (is not elite) parents not by their place of residence but as belonging to the barangay of Don So-and-so, some member of the local gentry. 14  THE WORD “FILIPINO”  When Ruy Lopez de Villalobos reached the Philippines in 1542, he named the island of Leyte and Samar, Filipinas, after the young prince who would become King Philip II, from which the later colony would be called Las Islas Filipinas.  The Spaniards called the natives of the archipelago indios, compounding Christopher Columbu’s well- known error of thinking he had reached the Orient- that is, Indies-in the Carribean. 15  To distinguish the indios of the Philippines from those of the Americans, they were called Filipinos.  The people of the Philippines were called Filipinos whey they were practicing their own culture – or, to put it another way, before they became indios.  In the nineteenth century, Spaniards began to be called Espanoles Filipinos to distinguish them from Spaniards born in Spain, 16  Philippine-born Spaniards, often resented being called Filipinos by Peninsulares, preferring the term Hijos del Pais – children of the land 17  FILIPINO PEOPLE  According to the historical study of Philippine populations, there were between one and two million inhabitants in the archipelago at the time of Spanish advent  The Spaniards recognized them as one race of medium stature. Black hair, and dark skin – though those dark enough to be called Kayumanggi (brown) 18  As an early Tagalog dictionary says of the word cayomangi, like Father Domingo de Nieva, and Father Fray Antonio they call maitim sa cayomangi (almost black)(Blancas de San Jose 1610, moreno)  They distinguished Filipinos by their languages, the Visayans by their tattoos, and highlanders as primitive.  They did not include those they called negros or negrillos (black or little black, that is Negritos. 19  Negritos belonged to a different race from the rest of the Filipino people  Spaniards were also inclined to refer to Muslim Filipinos – Moros – as a separate race  The Spaniards also recognized the Chinese as another race – like the political refugees they found settled on the Tondo waterfront and Manila. 20  PHILIPPINE LANGUAGE  Philippine language belong to the Austronesian language family, a huge group of more than six hundred languages  All of these languages, like the cultures of which they are part, are dynamic, not static; their vocabularies, grammar, and pronunciations are constantly changing. 21 THANK YOU! 22  References:  Scott, William Henry. “Barangay: Sixteenth-century Philippine Culture and Society by William Henry Scott, - Quezon City ADMU Press, c 1994. 1 v  National Quincentennial Committee, Republic of the Philippines – FB page  https://books.google.com.ph/books?id=15KZU- yMuisC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA2#v=onepage&q&f=false 23