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Originally Posted by migueldiaz
Ok, thanks for your generosity. I'll settle for the said cash equivalent   |
With demanding distant relatives like this...
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Originally Posted by migueldiaz
Good point, Nonoy. Let's wait for KuKulzA28's further comments ...
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I'm more of a novice at this field of knowledge than many of you but... here goes...
Let me take a few cultural traits that set the aforementioned groups apart. Now keep in mind, nothing is 100% definitive, there are exceptions... CORRECT ME IF I AM WRONG! There are several different peoples in Luzon yes? However the Cordilleran tribes are very distinct from the Tagalog/other people. These are people who practice headhunting, village-village warfare, are not sailors, and with what can be considered a lower level of civilization (in terms of infrastructure). The other peoples use distinctly different weaponry, and in Luzon many of these are Spanish influenced, have leather scabbards, and the most popular styles often come from the war with Spain/America and after. The Waray of Samar and Leyte also exhibit blade-characteristics that make them somewhat similar to the others. The people of the Dios Dios and Pulahan where tribal people in the hills. Although converted to Christianity (in many cases) they retained a lot of tribal ways and lived a semi-nomadic life-style. If they had agriculture it was growing hemp for sale. They often lived in the interior and fought with the more financially-savvy coastal people... I'm sure Hokkien Chinese were amongst those. While I doubt a vinta would be strange to a Waray hillman, and I don't think they were headhunters... culturally they share similarities as they have single bevel blades, semi-nomadic thus less infrastructure, village-village warfare, etc. The Kenyah and Kayan and other interior tribal people of Kalimantan/Borneo are another good example. They have modified chisel ground blades, headhunt, are not a seafaring civilization, practice village-village warfare.... and while their longhouses are big, it's not the same level of social and structural infrastructure as can be found in Jogyakarta, Bali, Sulu, Manila, etc. I do not know a lot about the Bhutanese nor the Lepcha people, but the Bhutanese sword is virtually identical to the Paiwanese sword, and the Lepcha people too have open-scabbards.
I DO think the sea-faring aspect is important. Look at Botel Tobago, the Yami island south of Taiwan and north of the Philippines. The Tao people, while genetically related to the Taiwanese aborigines, have more in common with northern Luzon Filipinos. They do not exhibit two traits endemic to Taiwanese Austronesians, and those are headhunting and drinking. They do however exhibit a sea-faring fishing culture... with very close cultural-cousins in Borneo. In fact, in their oral histories, they have gone to Luzon due to war... at one time there was more regular contact. THey are a vestiage of the oceanic culture than moved on from Taiwan, while the present-day aborigines had stayed and developed land-based cultures.
The more infrastructure there is, it seems these attributes also disappear. While headhunting might have been ubiquitous in the distant past, these peoples have had it up till more recently. Also the other Indo-Austronesians seem to have large cities, greater trade networks, and more centralized rule. Their blades tend to follow the patterns of klewang, parang, golok, and pedang. They have outside influences from Chinese, Indians, Malaysian (many are Melayu), etc. They, being more centralized and having larger populations based on a larger trade network, more intensive farming, and fishing - they conduct war differently and certainly not on a village-village level, they did it on a state-state level.
Maybe
it is a combination of environment, convergent evolution, and the distribution of ideas... but it seems the biggest of these groups have many things in common underlying their similarities in blade characteristics.
just some thoughts...