arkipelagic

mindanao / philippines / southeast asia icon: moro boy, elizabeth keith cover: t’boli people on lake sebu, bruno barbey

[arkipelagic]

pinned post + tags

hello, i am arkipelagic! i am originally from davao and mostly of visayan descent. my interest in mindanao history and its native cultures and peoples grew as a way to understand both my home island and my native mindanawon heritage better. while this blog began as a repository for those things, it is now dedicated to the philippines and the greater archipelagic southeast asian region as a whole: present day, historic, and prehistoric.

my tiktok (where i repost my blogposts)

mostly mindanao content, occasionally visayan, rarely luzon. special interest in contemporary and historical mindanao and sulu; prehistoric philippines; and pre-austronesian expansion.

english - cebuano - tagalog

original posts are tagged #x

personal posts are tagged #personal

filipino content are tagged as #filipinblr

[arkipelagic]

[walks out a creaky door covered in blood] austronesian is a language family… it’s not a stand-in descriptor for precolonial philippines or indigenous peoples…

[arkipelagic]

addendum: it’s not pertaining to gastronomy either, hooomygad

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reposting some blogposts on my tiktok again after nearly a year. upside: i’ve gotten more engagement in a few days than in the past 6+ months. downside: the posts that i care about the most are the ones ignored.

[arkipelagic]

trying to have a conversation in a filipino gc but it’s made up of mostly foreign-raised filipinos and they only start talking when the subject is about representation in a fucking cartoon or whatever

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hi my interests are in mindanao history and contemporary society with a special focus in moro and lumad communities

*crickets chirp*

i also like prehistory and am very interested in ice age philippines and our pre-austronesian ancestors in mainland china

*crickets chirp again*

would anyone like to talk about the earliest trade networks connecting what is now the philippine archipelago with modern day southeast asian states plus taiwan?

*crickets continue to chirp*

have you guys heard of that cartoon starring liza soberano and h.e.r.?

[arkipelagic]

@austerity-audacity-asceticism not so much as precolonial but prehistorical, but here they are:

arkipelagic

From left to right, top to bottom: pottery vase; burial jar; bronze weapon; clay fruit tray; and jade lingling-o. Photos #1–#4 by Bình Giang

When discussing Southeast Asian trading networks, the Sa Huynh-Kalanay Interaction Sphere exemplifies the kind of cross-regional social-econ

As many scholars have noticed, the Indianized polity of Champa [established in AD 192] in central Vietnam provides functional parallels for

both excerpts are from “Coastal Connectivity: Long-Term Trading Networks Across the South China Sea” (2013) by Hsiao-chun Hung et. al. related works (open access) include:

Taiwanese Prehistory: Migration, Trade, and the Maritime Economic Mode by Chin-yung Chao and Timothy Earle

Forged by Waves: Lingling-o and the Entangled Histories of Pacific Asia by Andre O. Magpantay

[arkipelagic]

[Time Trowel] The precolonial Filipino you’re looking for never existed

The search for an authentic precolonial Filipino rests on the wrong premise. It turns history into a purity test. It asks anthropology and a

A few days ago, my friend and colleague Karminn Daytec Yañgot shared a post about a problem that many of us in Indigenous studies, anthropology, archaeology, history, and heritage work keep running into. Some of our colleagues, she noted, remain preoccupied with the idea that decolonization means locating an authentic Indigenous self in a precolonial past, as if Indigenous peoples are unchanging, as if history happened everywhere else but somehow stopped at the edge of Indigenous worlds.

That habit runs deep in Philippine public discourse. It appears whenever people ask what is truly Filipino, purely native, or really precolonial. It appears in arguments about food, ritual, architecture, and language. It also appears in national histories that search for one interior cultural voice that can stand in for the whole archipelago, as if the many peoples of these islands once shared one worldview, one cultural core, one story.

That story offers coherence and a way around colonial injury by searching for a self supposedly untouched by it. But it gives us bad history, and anthropology helped make that history possible. For a long time, the discipline treated Indigenous peoples as if they belonged to another time, as survivals, remnants, or windows into an earlier stage of human life. The “native” became someone to document before disappearance, someone valued for distance from modernity. In that frame, change meant loss, and engagement with markets, states, schools, or Christianity signaled corruption. The more a community appeared untouched, the more useful it became to anthropology’s archive.

[arkipelagic]

trying to have a conversation in a filipino gc but it’s made up of mostly foreign-raised filipinos and they only start talking when the subject is about representation in a fucking cartoon or whatever

[arkipelagic]

hi my interests are in mindanao history and contemporary society with a special focus in moro and lumad communities

*crickets chirp*

i also like prehistory and am very interested in ice age philippines and our pre-austronesian ancestors in mainland china

*crickets chirp again*

would anyone like to talk about the earliest trade networks connecting what is now the philippine archipelago with modern day southeast asian states plus taiwan?

*crickets continue to chirp*

have you guys heard of that cartoon starring liza soberano and h.e.r.?

[arkipelagic]

trying to have a conversation in a filipino gc but it’s made up of mostly foreign-raised filipinos and they only start talking when the subject is about representation in a fucking cartoon or whatever

[arkipelagic]

good lord please put an end to pinoybait and these stupid ass filipino tiktoks

[arkipelagic]

(misinformation) (misinformation) (diaspora jungle asian humor) (“i’m a quarter filipino! 🔵👄🔵”) (more misinformation) (more diaspora humor)

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(feel-good historical revisionism) (homogeneized representation of precolonial philippines) (misinformation) (misinformation) (“why aren’t filipinos pacific islander instead of asian? 🇵🇭🇺🇸🧐”) (misinformation) (romanticized edit of indigenous peoples) (more misinformation)

[arkipelagic]

Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society (1994) by William Henry Scott

[jester-de-punyalada]

ID: book excerpt

When the Americans seized the Spanish colony as spoils of the Spanish American War, they called its inhabitants Filipinos, and so today citizens of the Republic of the Philippines are now recognized in international law as Filipinos. Common parlance, however, has tended to exclude people whose ancestors were never acculturated into the Spanish colony, even thought they vote in national elections and travel abroad on Philippine passports. Carlos P. Romulo was once burned in effigy by Baguio collegians for stating Igorots were not Filipinos, and many Muslims reject the term as a colonial imposition by a foreign power their ancestors resisted. Nor does the confusion end there. In 1955, Agnes Newton Keith incorporated a popular perception in her Bare Feet in the Palace: "In the nineteenth century by Spanish edict, the native born in the Islands was known as an 'indio' and not called Filipino" (Keith 1955, 74). But no such edict is known to serious history, though nonhistorians have not infrequently referred to such a restriction.

/End ID

[arkipelagic]

From left to right, top to bottom: pottery vase; burial jar; bronze weapon; clay fruit tray; and jade lingling-o. Photos #1–#4 by Bình Giang, 2009. Photo #5 by HappyMidnight, 2012. All photos taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Artifacts of the Sa Huỳnh culture. This culture originated in modern-day Vietnam and flourished between 1,000 BC and 200 AD. Due to early trade networks, the Sa Huỳnh culture had spread across Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

On the trade network, according to Wikipedia:

The Sa Huỳnh culture showed evidence of an extensive trade network that existed between 500 BC to AD 1500, known as the Sa Huynh-Kalanay Interaction Sphere (named after the Sa Huỳnh culture and the Kalanay Cave of Masbate, Philippines). It was mainly between Sa Huỳnh and the Philippines, but also extended into archaeological sites in Taiwan, Southern Thailand, and northeastern Borneo. It is characterized by shared red-slipped pottery traditions, as well as double-headed and penannular ornaments known as lingling-o made from materials like green jade (sourced from Taiwan), green mica (from Mindoro), black nephrite (from Hà Tĩnh) and clay (from Vietnam and the Northern Philippines).[5] Sa Huynh also produced beads made from glass, carnelian, agate, olivine, zircon, gold and garnet; most of whom use materials that are also imported. Han dynasty-style bronze mirrors were also found in Sa Huynh sites.[5][6][7]

[arkipelagic]

Excerpt from the novel “Child of All Nations” (1980) by Praemodya Ananta Toer

[wanderthewood]

Andi Hakim Nasution Building,  IPB University, Bogor, Indonesia by architecturehub_

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so. bato de la rosa.

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ZAMBOANGA CITY (MindaNews / 01 May) – Criminal complaints have been filed against 10 soldiers and two of their superiors for the death of three civilians, including a 12-year-old boy, during a bungled joint law enforcement operation in Barangay Sinunuc, this city, last week, City Mayor Khymer Olaso announced on his social media page on Thursday.

Olaso identified all the 12 respondents who have been charged for the death of Jerry Alfad, his 12-year-old-son Salam, and his nephew Rayyan, 22.

Complaints of multiple murder, multiple frustrated murder, and robbery were filed against 10 soldiers, while a complaint for criminal negligence was filed against Joint Task Force Zamboanga Commander, Col Danilo Ambe, and Maj Voltair Herrera.

On April 23, elements of the PNP Mindanao Area Police Intelligence Office and 9th Intelligence Service Unit of the AFP went to Sitio Alas-as, Barangay Sinunuc to serve a warrant of arrest for four counts of murder against a certain Saddam Siddik, whom authorities identified as a member of the Dawlah Islamiya-Abu Sayyaf.

The police said Siddik was sighted twice in the area during a month-long surveillance and intelligence monitoring.

In an earlier phone interview, Police Regional Office-9 Spokesperson Maj Shellamie Chang said the operatives knocked on the door of the Alfad residence and introduced themselves.

However, Chang said, two unidentified men fired at the government troops, “prompting them to fire back in self-defense.”

[…] Jerry’s other son Mohammad refuted claims of a shootout, saying most of their family members were already asleep since it was past midnight. He said his cousin Rayyan was awake as he was in charge of filling their buckets of water.

A water rationing schedule is currently being implemented in the city.

“It’s impossible that my father resisted because he was asleep in the bed together with our youngest sibling. My mother and sister who were in the other room were hit in the legs,” Mohammad said in Filipino.

[gael-garcia]

Enrique of Malacca played by Amado Arjay Babon in MAGELLAN (2025 🇵🇭, Lav Diaz)

Before Magellan set out on his journey to the Philippines, he had purchased Enrique in the Malaysian city of Malacca and taken him back to Portugal. Upon their arrival in Mactan, Magellan's entourage was startled to discover Enrique spoke the native language – suggesting he was raised nearby. Some historians have even conjectured that, in returning to the region, Enrique may actually have ended up circumnavigating the globe before any of Magellan's crew. (x)

[arkipelagic]

i do not like this tendency to frame precolonial filipinos and contemporary indigenous peoples as noble savages. it’s disingenuous; it’s done in direct response to euro-american colonization, not out of true interest for a heritage; and it’s infantilizing of real people and their real cultures and histories. it says, “we didn’t deserve to be colonized because we did XYZ right.” and that implies there is a righteous way to colonize other (lesser sophisticated, more brutish) people, that we were simply mislabeled and badly treated by mistake.

[arkipelagic]

“Austronesian is NOT a people. It is NOT one language. It is a label used by linguisticians to group related languages across Taiwan, Island Southeast Asia (and pockets of communities in Mainland Southeast Asia, including the Chams, the Mokens), Madagascar, and the Pacific. It has no single political body, no shared self awareness, no continuous historical agency. As a tool of classification, it was useful. As a civilizational subject, it is imagined.

When Austronesian is treated as the deep structure of tayo, a technical category turns into ancestral foundation. That move compresses difference, sidelines non-Austronesian populations (various Agta/Aeta groups who were once non-Austronesian speakers), and downplays long histories of exchange with South Asia, China, the Islamic world, and later Europe and the Americas. If we are serious about questioning perspective, then we must also question the civilizational assumptions embedded in our own frameworks.”

— Stephen Acabado, in response to Geronimo Cristobal