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Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #40807.
Ifugao Law is a detailed early study of customary law among the Ifugao people of northern Luzon. Drawing on the author’s eight years of residence among them, it examines how a society without constituted political government maintains order through custom, taboo, religion, kinship, and diplomacy. Its wide-ranging survey covers marriage, divorce, adoption, property, inheritance, debts, contracts, irrigation, crime, punishment, testimony, ordeals, retaliation, and peace-making. Alongside legal principles, Barton describes Ifugao communities, agriculture, religious beliefs, social relationships, and the mountain environment in which their celebrated rice terraces were built.
The book combines field observation with the systematic organization of a legal treatise, presenting numerous local terms, classifications, and procedures in a formal, confident voice characteristic of 1918 anthropology. Barton’s comparisons with Western society and his period language reflect the assumptions of his era, while his stated respect for customs unlike his own gives the study a strongly observational and analytical purpose. It will appeal to readers interested in Philippine ethnology, customary law, anthropology, indigenous social organization, and the ways communities regulate family life, property, responsibility, and conflict without centralized authority.
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"We are likely to think of the savage as a freakish creature, all moods--at one moment a friend, at the next moment a fiend. So he might be were it not for the social drill imposed by his customs. So he is, if you destroy his customs, and expect him nevertheless to behave as an educated and reasonable being. Given, then, a primitive society in a healthy and uncontaminated condition, its members will invariably be found to be on the average more law-abiding, as judged from the stand-point of their own law, than is the case in any civilized state.
"Of course, if we have to do with a primitive society on the down-grade--and very few that have been 'civilizaded,' as John Stuart Mill terms it, at the hands of the white man are not on the down-grade--its disorganized and debased custom no longer serves a vital function. But a healthy society is bound, in a wholesale way, to have a healthy custom."
R. R. Marrett, in Anthropology.
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