Abstract
WITH characteristic energy, the Americans have made a good beginning with the study of the multifarious natives of the Philippine Islands. Dr. A. E. Jenks, who is chief of the Ethnological Survey for the Philippine Islands, has recently published a substantial volume of 266 pages, and 554 plates, on the Bontoc Igorot, who live in the centre of the northern end of Luzon. Judging from the short account of their physical characters, they, like so many other peoples in the East Indian Archipelago, are a mixture of Indonesians and Proto-Malays; a few are distinctly narrow-headed, about three times as many are broad-headed, and somewhat less than two-thirds are intermediate. The average stature of the men is feet 41/8 inches; the women average nearly 7 inches shorter. There is no trace of Negrito blood. The settlement of Bontoc is divided into thirteen wards or political divisions, called ato; each has its separate governing council, which can declare war or make peace. Each ato contains three kinds of buildings:— (1) public edifices, fawi and pabafunan, for men and boys; (2) similar houses, ola, for girls and young women before their permanent marriage; and (3) private houses, afong, for families and widows. The pabafunan is the home of the various ato ceremonies, and is sacred to the male sex; it is the men 's club. by day and the unmarried men 's dormitory; the fawi is the council house, and as such is frequented mainly by old men; it i also the skull-houses Dr. Jeriks adds a note on the distribution of similar club-hoes in Eastern Asia and in Oceania. The “olag” is the dormitory of the girls from, the age of two years until marry, and where they receive their lovers. The “afong” is the only primitive dwelling in the Phillippines which is built on the ground, but it contains a small upper storey, andoften an attic over this; these are used as store-rooms for cereals. The clothes, ornaments, tattooing utensils, weapons, and the like are described and figured. Of great interest are the accounts of the ordinary domestic operations, especially those connected with the cultivation of rice and the regulation of irrigation; the rules seem to be framed with common-sense, and the people appear to be sufficiently law-abiding. The hill-sides are elaborately erraced; the author doubts whether this art has been borrowed from the Chinese, and inclines to the view that it is indigenous to the East Indian Archipelago, having spread northwards to Japan. Various plants are cultivated, but rice is the most important vegetable product, and in consequence most of the religious ceremonies are in connection with this crop, and take place at stated occasions from seed-sowing to the close of the harvest. Also associated with the importance of rice in the social economy is the employment of alay, the unthreshed rice, as a medium of exchange, and a measure of exchange value, for articles bought and sold. Palay is at all times a good currency; it is always in demand, being the staple food; it keeps eight or ten years without deterioration; it is portable and infinitely divisible; it is of very stable value, and cannot be counterfeited. Certain villages have special commodities, which are made or produced in superfluity for purposes of barter, such as pots, cloths, salt, pigs. The Igorot has as clear a conception of the relative value of two things bartered as has the civilised man when he buys or sells with money; but whatever he trades, be it a five-cent block of Mayinit salt or seventy-dollar carabao (buffalo), the worth of the article is always calculated on the basis of its value in palay, even though the payment is in money. The standard of value of the palay currency is the handful—a small bunch of alay tied up immediately below the heads of grain; it is about 1 foot long, half head and half straw. On the whole, there is great uniformity in the size of the handful.
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HADDON, A. An Ethnological Survey of the Philippines 1 . Nature 73, 584–586 (1906). https://doi.org/10.1038/073584f0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/073584f0