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Raiding, Trading, Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms. Laura Lee Junker. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. ix + 477 pp.; illustrations, maps, index, bibliography. Hardcover $59.00. ISBN: 0-8248-2035-5.
Reviewed by WILLIAM A. LONGACRE, University of Arizona, Tucson
Laura Junker has provided us with a most of complex sociopolitical systems in the comprehensive overview of the emergence prehistoric and ethnohistoric Philippines. Beyond that, she puts these polities into comparative perspective by looking at similar developments elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Her focus is on the emergence of complex systems increasingly engaged in long-distance maritime trade with China and other Asian states along the coasts of a number of the Philippine islands.
The book, a substantial revision of her 1990 doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, offers the most comprehensive examination of late Filipino prehistory and earliest history, drawing on an exhaustive examination of written documents. In addition, she uses extensive information from archaeological fieldwork, including her own extensive excavations in Negros Oriental in the Visayan region. She concludes that it is the participation in luxury good trade, especially for Chinese porcelain ceramics, in tandem with other developments in the political economy of the region that stimulates the emergence of complex polities in the prehistoric Philippines.
The book is divided into four parts. The first part reviews the general theory of the relationship between long-distance trade and the development of complex polities. She also reviews the nature of the historical and archaeological sources for exploring such developments in Southeast Asia. The second part examines the general theoretical background for the development of ranking and stratification of complex polities that are clearly...