barangay

In early Philippine history, barangay is the term historically used by scholars to describe the complex sociopolitical units that were the dominant organizational pattern among the various peoples of the Philippine archipelago in the period immediately before the arrival of European colonizers. Academics refer to these settlements using the technical term "polity", but they are usually simply called "barangays". Some barangays were well-organized independent villages, consisting of thirty to a hundred households. Other barangays — most notably those in Maynila, Tondo, Panay, Pangasinan, Cebu, Bohol, Butuan, Cotabato, and Sulu — were large cosmopolitan polities. The term originally referred to both a house on land and a boat on water, containing families, friends and dependents. 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. 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.