Do you have any information on precolonial/early Philippines?

by TheDumbJaymes

I'm looking for resources and any facts on precolonial days of the Philippines and also meanings of our tribal tattoos and culture in general!

KippyPowers

Yeah, I do have some sources. I tend to use sources that are written by Filipino academics from Filipino universities, so some of these could be tough to acquire, and in that case I can link some answers of mine from the past that make use of those resources, if you like. Just let me know in a follow-up.

Anyways, I think a great starting point for you would be a book such as Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society by William Henry Scott. As you can see from the title, this book focuses on the cultures of the Philippines as they were when the Spanish first arrived in the islands. The Philippines by that point was largely Muslim (Islam has had a profound effect on Filipino culture and society, to this very day), though a very synctretic Islam, being mixed heavily with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Anitism (an umbrella term for the indigenous beliefs). Scott was a pretty influential scholar of the Philippines, really being one of the ones that laid the foundation of modern Philippine Studies, along with the indigenous movement among Filipino scholars at the University of the Philippines. The book I am recommending is older now, and some of the stuff is now out of date, but other stuff is still excellent, and people cite this work constantly even nowadays. Scott was also vehemently anti-racist and a promoter of research by Filipinos for Filipinos, so he was just an all-around good academic.

In this vein, I strongly recommend a book by the Filipino clinical psychologist, EJR David. The book is Brown Skin, White Minds: Filipino -/ American Postcolonial Psychology. I recommend this book because it really helps Filipinos and the Filipino diaspora understand the effects of colonialism and colonial mentality on their entire modern culture and way of thinking about themselves. It does include a precolonial historical element to it anyways.

Backtracking back to Islam and its importance to the Philippines, I would recommend Islamic Far East: The Ethnogenesis of Philippine Islam by Isaac Donoso and Muslims In The Philippines by Cesar Adib Majul. Donoso addresses the Muslim worldview and the beginnings of Islam in the Philippines, so it is very precolonial in its scope, and Majul discusses Muslim Filipinos in general, as well as their interactions with colonizing forces. Majul is another extremely important scholar of the Philippines and Filipino himself, so his work is well worth your time.

Raiding, Trading, and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms by Laura Lee Junker, is a great study of what the book title implies: the trading interactions of Philippine polities with other areas, with a strong focus on the precolonial. It discusses ancient trade connections with China, with far flung areas in Southeast Asia, and lots more. Very important book and very interesting.

If you can get your hands on a copy of Tradition and Transformation: Studies on Cordillera Indigenous Culture by June Prill-Brett, you should. Prill-Brett is herself a Bontok Filipino, one of the ethnolinguistic groups of the region this book covers, and she is also one of the most influential scholars of Filipino anthropology. This region was not directly colonized by the Spanish, similar to Sulu in the southern Philippines, so certain cultural traditions were not as strongly affected by colonialism until the American period. However, that doesn't mean this region is a window into the precolonial Philippines. These Filipinos are not 500 years removed from change. All cultures change over time, but they change in different ways, and are affected by colonialism in different ways. In addition, this region isn't representative of all regions, so you can't take these cultural practices as a proxy for the whole archipelago. Tattooing, interestingly, is actually still alive to some extent in this region of the Philippines, but it once was widespread throughout the Philippines, and indeed throughout Southeast Asia and Oceania in general. There are tattoing traditions in Viet Nam and Indonesia, for example. Tattoing in the Philippine context was largely related to warfare, though that aspect has gone away over time due to colonialism. Now tattooing, regardless of usage, is dead or dying pretty much everywhere in the islands.

I think these are good starting points for you. Have fun.