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Peoples of Southern Palawan The narrow and elongated island of Palawan is home to several autochthonous groups, namely the Tagbanuwa, the Bataks, and the Palawan people (spelled variously as Pala’wan, Pala-wan, Pelawan, etc.).1 In the southern part of the island, stretching over 150 kilometers, live 40 to 50,000 Palawan people.2 They share their homeland with a number of other groups as well, both Muslim and Christian. Among the latter, the Cuyunon, people hailing from Cuyo Island just north of the mainland, were the first to become established (Eder 2004). Christian settlers from all over the archipelago started arriving in number after World War II, but especially in the past 25 years. The island of Palawan is a frontier area where resettlement projects have been established, and representatives of almost all groups of Filipinos can be found on the island, from Kalingas and Ilocanos originating from the northern part of the archipelago to Cebuano-speaking people coming from Mindanao in the south. Among the Muslim settlers, the Jama Mapun, hailing from Cagayan de Jolo, or Pullun Mapun, and a few Maranao and Taosug are the main and older elements present on the southern shores of the island. The lingua franca spoken on the island is Tagalog, or Filipino. A growing number of Palawan speakers have become fluent in this language. The Palawan people form an ethnolinguistic entity, an autochthonous population that has diversified over the course of centuries and whose communities, adapting to various ecological niches from coastal to mountainous, have become to a certain extent culturally and linguistically differentiated. There are no two communities, however, that cannot understand each other, in spite of dialectal variations; the Palawan language is therefore sufficiently homogeneous to serve as a basis of ethnic identity among all its speakers. As elsewhere, it is difficult to capture in one simple definition what is meant by “ethnic identity.” Let us just say that Palawan people everywhere use the term “Palawan” (with some minor 11 1 The Kulbi-Kenipaqan River Basin and Its People 12 part one: pal awan culture and societ y phonetic differences according to the dialect, and often a glottal stop, transcribed as ‘ or -, thus Pala’wan or Pala-wan) to describe those who speak the same language and whose ancestors were indigenous people from the island.3 In itself, to be a Palawan carries a meaning of separateness and difference from the Christian and Muslim settlers and neighbors, as well as from other native groups like the Molbog on the southern island of Balabac, or the Tagbanuwa in the north. The awareness of an undivided Palawan ethnic identity including all sections of the linguistic community is a recent phenomenon that was obscured by attention paid to local variations, thus making indigenous speakers see other Palawan communities as more or less alien.4 In the course of my studies I lived and stayed for extended periods of time with five communities in different locations. I came to the conclusion that apart from linguistic differences, local variations were most significant in two areas: 1) ecological and economic orientation along a gradient from the seashore to the middle slopes of the central mountainous system, and 2) beliefs and representations , as well as practices, relating to the supernatural, or what is commonly referred to as “religion.” In all other aspects pertaining to social organization, kinship, residence rules, and customary law, all sections of this ethnic group are remarkably similar. Their social ties are based on cognatic kinship, with a predominance of the monogamous family as the core social and economic unit.5 All Palawan were, up to recent times, shifting agriculturists, while also relying on marine, riverine, and forest products for subsistence and housing, some relying more on hunting and others more on fishing depending on their location on the sea-mountain gradient . They all chanted epics and told myths or legends sharing similar traits in form and content (Macdonald 1988a), they all played more or less the same musical instruments, built the same houses, lived in small settlements or hamlets , were all peaceful and nonviolent, entertained polytheistic beliefs, and made basketry, blowguns, and other artifacts, with some minor variations in style. Material life varied slightly with few exceptions, like the presence or absence of rice wine and the seasonal use of caves and rock shelters as dwelling places, where they existed.6 Ethnohistory and the Inland-Coastal Gradient From an ethnohistorical point...

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