Precolonial barangay

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In early Philippine history, barangay is the term historically used by scholars^[1] to describe the complex sociopolitical units^[2]: 4–6 that were the dominant organizational pattern among the various peoples of the Philippine archipelago^[3] in the period immediately before the arrival of European colonizers.^[4] Academics refer to these settlements using the technical term "polity",^[3][5] but they are usually simply called "barangays".^{[4][2][page needed]}

Some barangays were well-organized independent villages, consisting of thirty to a hundred households.^{[4][page needed][6][7]} Other barangays — most notably those in Maynila, Tondo, Panay,^[8] Pangasinan, Cebu, Bohol, Butuan, Cotabato, and Sulu^[5][9] — were large cosmopolitan polities.^{[2][page needed]}

The term originally referred to both a house on land and a boat on water, containing families, friends and dependents.^[10][11]

Anthropologist F. Landa Jocano defines this period of the barangay states' dominance — approximately the 14th to the 16th centuries — as the "Barangic Phase" of early Philippine history.^[4] The Barangic Phase of Philippine history can be noted for its highly mobile nature, with barangays transforming from being settlements and turning into fleets and vice versa, with the wood constantly re-purposed according to the situation.^[12]

Some scholars such as Damon Woods, however, have recently challenged the use of the term barangay to describe the Philippines' various indigenous polities, citing a lack of linguistic evidence and the fact that all of the primary references suggesting that use of the term can be traced to just a single source - Juan de Plascencia's 1589 report Las costumbres de los indios Tagalos de Filipinas. Instead, Woods argues that this use of the term barangay reflected what was merely an attempt by the Spanish to reconstructing pre-conquest Tagalog society.^[13]

The term has since been adapted as the name of the basic political unit of the Philippines.^[10] So historical barangays should not be confused with present-day Philippine barrios, which were officially renamed barangays by the Philippine Local Government Code of 1991 as a reference to historical barangays.