In early Philippine history, barangay is the term historically used by scholars[1] to describe the complex sociopolitical units that were the dominant organizational pattern among the various peoples of the Philippine archipelago[2] in the period immediately before the arrival of European colonizers. Academics refer to these settlements using the technical term "polity",[2] [3] but they are usually simply called "barangays".
Some barangays were well-organized independent villages, consisting of thirty to a hundred households.[4] [5] [6] Other barangays — most notably those in Maynila, Tondo, Panay,[7] Pangasinan, Cebu, Bohol, Butuan, Cotabato, and Sulu[3] [8] — were large cosmopolitan polities.
The term originally referred to both a house on land and a boat on water, containing families, friends and dependents.[9] [10]
Anthropologist F. Landa Jocano defines this period of the barangay states' dominance — approximately the 14th to the 16th centuries — as the "Barangic Phase" of early Philippine history.[4] The Barangic Phase of Philippine history can be noted for its highly mobile nature, with barangays transforming from being settlements and turning into fleets and vice versa, with the wood constantly re-purposed according to the situation.[11]
Some scholars such as Damon Woods, however, have recently challenged the use of the term barangay to describe the Philippines' various indigenous polities, citing a lack of linguistic evidence and the fact that all of the primary references suggesting that use of the term can be traced to just a single source - Juan de Plascencia's 1589 report Las costumbres de los indios Tagalos de Filipinas. Instead, Woods argues that this use of the term barangay reflected what was merely an attempt by the Spanish to reconstructing pre-conquest Tagalog society.[12]
The term has since been adapted as the name of the basic political unit of the Philippines.[9] So historical barangays should not be confused with present-day Philippine barrios, which were officially renamed barangays by the Philippine Local Government Code of 1991 as a reference to historical barangays.
See main article: Models of migration to the Philippines.
See also: Balangay. Theories, as well as local oral traditions,[13] say that the original "barangays" were coastal settlements formed as a result of the migration of Austronesian people, who came to the archipelago by boat from Taiwan initially, and stayed in the archipelago to create a thalassocratic and highly sea dependent civilization based on outrigger boats, catamarans and stilt houses. This became the mainstays of the Austronesian speaking populations through the expansion from Maritime Southeast Asia out into the Pacific.
Noting the mobile and maritime nature of Austronesian culture, these ancient barangays were coastal or riverine in nature. This was because most of the people relied on fishing for their supply of protein and livelihoods. They also travelled mostly by water up and down rivers, and along the coasts.
Trails always followed river systems, which were also a major source of water for bathing, washing, and drinking. Early chroniclers record that the name evolved from the term balangay, which refers to a plank boat widely used by various cultures of the Philippine archipelago prior to the arrival of European colonizers; in essence a barangay is a ship or a fleet of ships and also a house or a settlement.[14]
Historically, the first barangays started as relatively small communities of around 30 to 100 families, with a population that varies from one hundred to five hundred persons. When the Spaniards came, they found communities with only twenty to thirty people, as well as large and prestigious principalities.
The coastal villages were more accessible to trade with foreigners. These were ideal places for economic activity to develop. Business with traders from other Countries also meant contact with other cultures and civilizations, such as those of Japan, Han Chinese, Indian people, and Arabs.[15]
In time, these coastal communities acquired more advanced cultures, with developed social structures (sovereign principalities), ruled by established royalties and nobilities.[16]
The smallest barangays were communities of around 30 to 100 households,[4] led by a Datu,[5] or a leader with an equivalent title. This was the typical size of inland settlements by the time the Spanish colonizers arrived in the late 1500s, whereas larger, more cosmopolitan polities dominated the coasts, particularly river deltas.[8] [2]
See also: Paramount rulers in early Philippine history. When barangays grew larger, as was the case in Maynila, Tondo, the Madja-as of Panay, Pangasinan, Cebu, Bohol, Butuan, Sanmalan, Cotabato, Sulu, and Lanao,[8] among others, they took on a more complex social organization. Several barangays, consisting of households loyal to a datu, Rajah or Sultan banded together to form larger cosmopolitan polities as an apex city states.[6] The Rulers of these barangays would then select the most senior or most respected among them to serve as a paramount datu. These polities sometimes had other names (such as bayan in the Tagalog regions[4] [5]) but since the terminology varies from case to case, scholars such as Jocano[4] and Scott simply refer to them as "larger" barangays.
Grace Odal-Devora traces the etymology of the term bayan to the word bahayan, meaning a "community", or literally "a place with many households (bahay)."[17] The majority of these early "bayan" were economically complex communities situated river deltas where rivers exit out into the ocean, and featured a compact community layout which distinguished them from inland communities, thus the name.[18]
Odal-Devors notes that bayan's root word, Ba-y or Ba-i, is linguistically related to other Philippine words for shoreline and perimeter (both baybay), woman (babai or the Visayan term ba-i "great lady"), friend (the Visayan term bay), and writing (baybayin).[17] She also notes that these terms are the basis for many place-names in the Philippines, such as Bay, Laguna and Laguna de Bay, and Baybay.[17]
The earliest documentation of the term "Bayan" was done by early Spanish missionaries who came up with local language dictionaries to facilitate the conversion of the peoples of the Philippine archipelago to Roman Catholicism. Among the most significant of these dictionaries was the Vocabulario de la lengua tagala by the Augustinian missionary Fray Pedro de San Buenaventura, who described it as a large town with four to ten datu lived with their followers, called dulohan or barangay.[19]
After the various polities of the Philippine archipelago were united into a single political entity during colonial times, the term gradually lost its original specific meaning, and took on more generic, descriptive denotations: population center (poblacion) or capital (cabisera); municipality; or in the broadest sense, "country".[20] Among the most prominent of these bayan entities were those in Maynila, Tondo, Pangasinan, Cebu, Bohol, Butuan, Cotabato, and Sulu.[21] [22]
Although popular portrayals and early nationalist historical texts sometimes depict Philippine paramount rulers as having broad sovereign powers and holding vast territories, critical historiographers such as Jocano,[4] Scott,[22] and Junker[3] explain that historical sources clearly show paramount leaders exercised only a limited degree of influence, which did not include claims over the barangays and territories of less-senior datus. For example, F. Landa Jocano, in his seminal work Filipino Prehistory: Rediscovering Precolonial Heritage, notes:
Keifer compares this situation to similarly-structured African polities where "component units of the political structure consist of functionally and structurally equivalent segments integrated only loosely by a centralized authority dependent on the consensual delegation of power upwards (sic) through the system."[23] Junker, expounding further on Keifer's work, notes: