by William Henry Scott
This posthumously-published masterwork of the leading scholar of the pre-Spanish Philippines is a wonderful argument for the centrality of Philippine evidence for a reconstruction of Southeast Asian societies. Scott is very cautious himself about drawing parallels or larger pictures, confining himself to answering the question, "What did the Spaniards actually say about the Filipino people when they first met them?". As a long-term resident of the Philippines his primary aim is to correct popular Philippine misperceptions, especially the unfortunate Beyer "wave theory" of migration which enabled "Filipinos who had grown up under Spanish domination [to] consider themselves a different people from those who had not... It is precisely this social amnesia which today stigmatises as cultural minorities those Filipinos who resisted colonial acculturation"
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