Talk:Butuan (historical polity)

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Clarification regarding the title of King Kiling

I have modified any mention of King Kiling being a "raja" as the sources used for the writing of this article never ever mentioned the Butuan chief being a "raja" in the first place. Wikipedia editors contributing to this page should avoid unjustified fact-twisting. Also, the mention of Butuan being a "small Hindu country with a Buddhist monarchy" and claiming that it was so according to the Chinese annal of the Song Dynasty is unjustified, as the Chinese primary source didn't even mention anything about the Hindu-ness or the Buddhist-ness of the Butuan polity during this era of contact with China. Stricnina (talk) 22:23, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Rename Rajahnate of Butuan into "Raj" of Butuan.

The term Rajahnate does not exist in the English language, when I transferred the information from this website: https://thebulwaganfoundation.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/the-kingdom-of-butuan/ they named it a "Rajahnate", however such a term did not exist in English, the proper term is "Raj" as applied to this article: "The Raj of Sarawak" in... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raj_of_Sarawak. I therefore propose a multiple renaming of three articles using the term "Raj": the Rajahanates of Maynila, Butuan and Cebu.

Requested move 21 February 2020

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Moved to Butuan (historical polity) and Cebu (historical polity) as the nearest approximation of a consensus move target. I will leave it to the participants to sort out the lede wording. BD2412 T 16:29, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

• Rajahnate of Butuan → Raj of Butuan
• Rajahnate of Cebu → Raj of Cebu

– There is no such word as "Rajahnate" in the English language to refer to a kingdom ruled by a Rajah, the proper term is "Raj" that mislabeling is due to this site which mistakenly labeled the "Raj" of Butuan as a "Rajahnate" https://thebulwaganfoundation.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/the-kingdom-of-butuan/ in contrast, the nearby state of Sarawak is called the "Raj of Sarawak" under the white Rajah James Brooke. --Rene Bascos Sarabia Jr. (talk) 14:04, 21 February 2020 (UTC) —Relisting. BegbertBiggs (talk) 23:01, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

• Move instead to Kingdom of Butuan and Kingdom of Cebu. Shhhhwwww!! (talk) 00:06, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose: Follow the lead of Tondo (historical polity) and move/rename them to Butuan (historical polity) and Cebu (historical polity) instead. Let's not use the word raj since virtually no historian of precolonial Philippines uses such a term. Stricnina (talk) 17:38, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose. The WP:COMMONNAME is really simply Butuan, but for WP:RECOGNIZABILITY, id suggest Kingdom of Butuan. I think the "historical polity" disambiguation for the Kingdom of Tondo is barely recognizable for a lot of readers who arent familiar with the word polity at all. ;)--RioHondo (talk) 07:20, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

• Comment: I would also oppose the use of "kingdom" here as sufficiently explained by Alternativity in the discussion section regarding the naming of the Tondo (historical polity) page. Scholarly sources tend to avoid the word "kingdom" entirely. I also recommend everyone to read Alternativity's long point regarding the commonality of the usage of the word "kingdom" (in the context of precolonial Philippine polities such as Tondo) in a raw Google search compared to the filtered search through academic sources such as Google Scholar, Google Books, etc. Stricnina (talk) 08:58, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

• I remember the discussion regarding the need to strip ancient civilizations like Tondo of euro centric tags, like kingdom, empire etc. It's just that the word polity might be too scientific or something that only political experts or political science students might know of. For one, it's hardly used in common literature at least as far as Philippine English is concerned. If there was a common denominator in all these ancient Philippine societies, it's that they were all ruled by a datu at least in one instance and that they all formed a balangay structure and hierarchy. And Datu in most English dictionaries translate to Chieftain, which is also commonly used in PH english. And what do you call a settlement ruled by a chieftain? A chiefdom. Maybe that's what these articles should start calling themselves. :) Nevermind what i said about recognizability. Instead, id like to hear Alternativity's take on referring to them as chiefdoms instead, like the Chiefdom of Butuan, once ruled by the Chieftain (Datu) Buntuan :).--RioHondo (talk) 10:43, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

IMHO Both Kingdom and Chiefdom fall under the same trap - there are technical considerations for the usage both, defined under eurocentric parameters. To be honest, I'm distressed to find the term Rajahnate "does not exist in the English language." It wasn't my suggestion, but I thought it worked. Could we possibly check local usage of the term? If it truly doesn't... well, like I said, I'm disturbed. On the basis of just accuracy, I really have to vote we default to Polity. (Raj feels awkward, but I won't object to it as a less desirable compromise.) - Alternativity (talk) 01:57, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Additional note: there seem to be independent uses of the term "Rajahnate" on the |Butuan LGU page, | Esquire Magazine, and | an opinion column in the Sun Star.... I submit that the term is "in use" unless there is some rule where Wikipedia is supposed to only use words that have been added to things like the Oxford English Dictionary. (That seems downright silly to me, though. Language evolves far too fast and English in too many variations for something like OED to keep up. Wikipedia can't invent words per se, I agree but on the other hand, Dictionaries don't have sole control over the evolution of language.)- Alternativity (talk) 02:05, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

The objection to Raj (and this is not my objection, just me putting it out here) is that Filipino usage of english generally does not use Raj. That's why colloquial use of Rajahnate - not by Wiki, but by other popular media as I cited above - evolved in the first place. The reason Rajahnate is more acceptable than Kingdom and Chiefdom is that those terms have alternate technical definitions which may, through the usage of those terms, be imputed upon "Precolonial Butuan" in a way that misrepresents the sociopolitical strucutre of that society. -Alternativity (talk) 02:14, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

I checked the links you posted, the Butuan LGU site seemed to have copied from WP, while the other two are fairly recently published, one is dated 2018, the other 2019. So based on those, the term rajahnate might fall under the category of neologism which i dont know, does this violate any WP standard here? Its tagalog article is titled Karahanan ng Butuan, which means its probably also copied from this article. But inside, the Cebuano and Butuanon translations say Gingharian hong Butuan and Gingharian sa Butuan, which i believe also meant Kingdom or Kaharian in Tagalog.--RioHondo (talk) 05:55, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Well, to be truthful, I don't care for Rajahnate all that much. I actually had nothing to do with it other than supporting the change when it was suggested. What does matter to me is that both Chief and King are inaccurate - arguably more so than referring to the Emperor of Japan as "King", which I don't think most of us would care for. - Alternativity (talk) 02:24, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, how is the term Chief or the widely used Chieftain inacurrate again? It doesn't sound euro to me. In fact, it sounds tribal and archaic, and wont be confused with any present-day ruler or monarch title in europe or elsewhere. I get the resistance to use Kingdom so even if it is also widely used to refer to those early states, i dropped my support for it too. Even when Hari is an older term in the PH than king or rey, brought to the islands by indianized settlers or merchants from elsewhere in the region earlier than the spanish did, the word kingdom gives the false impression of a royal monarchy and empire which these early communities weren't.--RioHondo (talk) 07:31, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

BTW, i just remembered we have an article here on barangay state where your historical polities are categorized. So why don't we use that for disambiguation so that they link straight away to the definition compared to historical polity which some people are not familiar with? It's too technical a term for the uninitiated readers imo.--RioHondo (talk) 08:02, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

A radical proposal: how about we avoid the debate over terminology altogether and start implementing the use of "Early history of (the)..." whenever we are stuck in a debate between mass-market labels and academic terminology, when there are conflicting terms for the same thing, or when the name for a certain thing hasn't been settled upon by the sources? Truth be told, the more I look at it, the more I worry about "state" in Barangay state not having enough sourcing support. - Alternativity (talk) 01:50, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I like the more neutral term "polity" too, however I have to admit that Wikipedia should reflect popular nonmenclature. Nevertheless, the term Raj is a Sanskrit term officially in use in British English, (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/raj#English), under what orbit does the Philippines fall under? American, British or it's own Filipino English?--Rene Bascos Sarabia Jr. (talk) 14:02, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Comment: I share Alternativity's concern regarding the word "state" in the "barangay-state". The more sources I read (Junker, Nakpil-Zialcita, Miksic, etc.), the more I realize that most experts of precolonial Philippine history tend to make distinctions between "state" and "chiefdom" (Zialcita also mentioned "nonstate society" compared to "state society"), and Philippine polities tend to be classified as "chiefdom" as compared to the Philippine State that emerged during the Spanish era. In other words, whether the precolonial Philippine polities are even "states" is even in dispute! At least one source (Jocano) argues that the precolonial Philippine polities (which he called "barangays") are deserving to be called "state" but he also acknowledges the dispute behind using this term, and at the same time he redefines what a "state" is in order to also include the pre-colonial Philippine polities in this classification. Recent scholars tend to just abandon the term "state" altogether. In the book "Ancient Southeast Asia" for example, Miksic prefers to use "mandala" as a more befitting term to describe the SEA polities.

The word polity is used by Junker (in the book "Raiding, Trading and Feasting" 1999), Miksic ("Ancient Southeast Asia", 2016) and Abinales & Amoroso ("Sate and Society in the Philippines", 2005), Zialcita ("Authentic Though Not Exotic", 2005) and in some works of Jean-Paul Potet (e.g."ancient Butuan polity of Mindanao" in his book "Baybayin, the syllabic alphabet of the Tagalogs", 2019). I really urge everyone to investigate more on the commonality of this word on reliable sources and perhaps consider the term in the renaming process. Stricnina (talk) 08:39, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Comment: Rene Bascos Sarabia Jr., it's a bit inconsistent, but in general our scholarly topics tend to apply American English more strictly, while our pop culture topics tend to apply a Philippine English variant - but I'm not sure it matters in this case, where in essence there's a modern concept which didn't really exist in the ancient world because the distinction was not yet important, but in which Wikipedia also cannot ignore the new concept because of the need for disambiguation. - Chieharumachi (talk) 08:50, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

If there are issues with the use of barangay state or states in general to refer to these early PH societies then we have to come up with a decision now. Which one will it be? Aside from barangay state and category, there's also Template:Former and present states in the Philippines that has to be rectified, i dont know how much more references there are of barangay states or early states for these precolonial barangays across WP. Seeing those sources now, historical polity turns out to be a good balance between neutrality and popular usage. However, the barangay state article and category will be orphaned if these items will be called a different name, or will they?--RioHondo (talk) 11:13, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

My personal suggestion is to follow the lead of Tondo (historical polity) and use the term "polity" to describe the precolonial Philippine barangays and suprabaranganic political entities. In fact, it's the most neutral but also academically-acknowledged term that we have so far, without falling into the pit of the controversies regarding the definition of terminologies like "kingdom", "state", "chiefdom", etc. I agreed with the renaming of Tondo (historical polity) because of the balance of neutrality and commonality of the word "polity" as RioHondo already noticed, and I will agree to the renaming of the rest of the Philippine precolonial "barangays" (using the Jocano terminology) like how the Tondo article was renamed. I admit I also do not oppose the suggested alternative title by Alternativity. As for the the barangay state and the name of the category itself, I would also initiate a renaming discussion of those too. Stricnina (talk) 22:29, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

To be honest, the status Barangay state completely fried my brain when I last touched it, since I knew Barangay (historical polity) wouldn't get support at the time. Do note, by the way, that before the Spanish came along, these Barangays were more defined by their loyalty/leadership structures rather than their geographical location. I was also going to suggest that discussion of larger settlements consisting of multiple barangays be moved to Bayan (settlement), but lost gas before I could move forward with the proposal. So...technically, it's Bayan (settlement) (what Scott called a "large Barangay), not Barangay, that comes closer to state. (Although there still doesn't seem to be much academic support for the use of the word state.) I see also that the greater clarity offered by Damon Woods' book "The Myth of the Barangay" (offering an integration of the work done by Scott, Junker, Jocano, etc) hasn't really made it into either article. Anybody with access wanna help with that? - Alternativity (talk) 01:01, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

@Alternativity: The only article I've read from Damon Woods that deals with the same topic is "From Wilderness to Nation: The Evolution of Bayan" (2005). However, he mostly dealt with the Tagalog political organization and also noted that he couldn't find equivalent terms outside the Tagalog socio-political context. Whether the word "bayan" can also be applied to non-Tagalog political organizations I can't answer "yes" because as of now I can't find other scholars that use the term as a description of any non-Tagalog polities. Even Damon Woods in the aforementioned article focused mostly on the Tagalog political reality. That is why I am uncomfortable with the usage of the term "bayan" to describe those historical polities outside the Tagalosphere like Cotabato, Sulu and Cebu like how the Wikipedia article Bayan (settlement) apparently does (at least in the lead section). Stricnina (talk) 06:07, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

I share your concern about applying the term Bayan to early settlements outside Luzon, because unlike Barangay, it is not indigenous to the Visayan and other languages of Mindanao. I believe their term for it is Banwa or Lungsod. Plus, i thought Alternativity was joking when he mentioned it. First time i heard the term used outside its normal usage, like that of a municipality or nation. But Bayan, a historical polity and a WP article too? Hehe! Regarding the barangay state article, im afraid we cant just alter the name completely as it is widely used and recognized as the term for our early settlements. The disambiguation though we can discuss for Barangay.--RioHondo (talk) 16:58, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Okay, how about this as a workaround? We create a Category:Historical polities in the Philippines and under it are your Barangay state (we'll work on the disambiguation later) and Bayan (settlement) (BTW, this too needs a better disambiguation as the present-day municipality we call Bayan in Filipino is also technically a settlement). And then we also link these kingdoms, rajahnates, sultanates, etc under the Historical polities category so that they are independent of the barangay and bayan boxes. Btw, i came across this book by UP Diliman History/NHCP chair Samuel K. Tan that uses the term Rajaship and Datuship. Look it up and tell me what you think of them.--RioHondo (talk) 17:12, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

If we can agree on the use of "Historical polity" for geographically unbound loyalty structures (i.e. pulutong, barangay, etc), and "Historical settlement" (Bayan, Ili, Banwa, etc) for places, I think we can settle on the wide use of "Historical" as a constant disambiguating element - at the very least, it would stop people from moving the articles to the imprecise "ancient" and the inaccurate and eurocentric "precolonial." As for Bayan (settlement), maybe we can move it to a title that isn't a proper noun? Something like "Apex settlements in early Philippine history"? - Alternativity (talk) 02:01, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

I dont think it is necessary to differentiate these early political structures from their political settlements. It just complicates an already complicated and complex topic. Hehe! Actually, i think i found a fix for these terminologies so that theyre neutral and without having to use any parenthetical disambiguation but still recognizable: we use their indigenous spellings, them being indigenous states or settlements. Baranggay instead of Barangay state and Kabayanan instead of Bayan (settlement). That way we don't have to come up with potentially inaccurate labels for them, and we also accomplish the disambiguation requirement for them from the present day Barangay and Sangguniang Barangay and Municipalities of the Philippines (Bayan) and Sangguniang Bayan articles. Your thoughts? And we also can just rename Category:Former countries in Philippine history to Category:Former polities in the Philippines (With your permision to use former instead of historical), it being a child category of Category:Former countries in Southeast Asia. But that's just the generic category that has no parent article. These former polities can still keep their "(historical polity)" disambiguation because of their earlier naming consensus.--RioHondo (talk) 06:34, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Just a heads up. There is an ongoing RM discussion at Talk:Tondo (historical polity) to move the article to its archaic and indigenous name of Tundun which I hope we can also apply to the Barangay state article and other historical polities that are currently disambiguated.--RioHondo (talk) 14:51, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

@RioHondo: I don't agree with the name change from Tondo to Tundun. I also wish a prior discussion was carried out first, which could have been initiated by Shhhhwwww!!. AFAIK, Tondo is still the most popular name of that polity in many sources, the only disagreement lies with what kind of polity Tondo is (e.g. is it a state? a chiefdom? a barangay?). But every source I can see still refers to that polity as "Tondo". I stick with the WP:COMMONNAME criteria and not change its name by adding a letter "n" to the end, especially since the Laguna Copperplate Inscription is written in a different writing script and language, the nuances or other linguistic features of which might explain the presence of an -n in the end of the name of the polity. Also, as I said in the Tondo talk page, the proposed etymology of the name Tondo was from the Tundok banana plant and "Tundok" is also most likely how the natives called their own polity. "Tundun" could have been the exonym of Tondo, judging from the language the LCI was written. We could have investigated this further by consulting more sources, but alas the voting has begun. Stricnina (talk) 14:10, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

I did inform you the minute i learned about such requested move up there? Anyway, the etymology of Tondo is not the question here, but what the early documents call the settlements. And the oldest document, the LCI, calls it as such, so we follow it. That's my opinion. It's a relatively new discovery hence the limited references, and honestly there's really nothing in WP that a hatnote can't do. It's not the primary topic anyway, but if moving Rajahnate of Cebu to Sugbu gets the work done and achieves our goal for a neutral, easy to digest article title without the unnecessary and unstable label of a barangay, state, kingdom, etc, then why bother with the technicalities? It's not like people google Tondo for the historical polity, they don't. Like i said it's not the primary topic. Same with the Kingdom of Cebu, even if it was in Cebu (historical polity), it just isn't the likely search term for the historical polity. Now if it's Sugbu or Sugbo, what does the oldest document available say the settlement was called? But whatever it is, it still is much better than the current disambiguated title.--RioHondo (talk) 15:14, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

@RioHondo:, I believe I answered most of your responses in the talk page of Tondo (historical polity). Also, just because one document (no matter how important it is) calls the polity/kingdom/chiefdom/state with such a name doesn't mean that we have to adopt it. The WP:TITLE has explicitly laid out criteria to be considered regarding what title should be adopted. If it can't even satisfy the very simple WP:COMMONNAME criterion, then it should not be adopted. Also, if you are worried about the stability of "polity", then you should not be worried about it: if you look at what "polity" is supposed to mean and what kind of polities are there (there are many kinds of polities, from "autonomous localities" to "chiefdoms" to "states", "kingdoms", "sultanates", etc.), then "polity" is assured to be stable over time. The renaming of that Wikipedia article is just fixing what is not broken and I personally consider it as a waste of time. Stricnina (talk) 17:17, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Ok, here's the deal. The WP:COMMONNAME is not the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for the term as i already said. Whereas with Sugbu/Sugbo or Tundun/Tundok, they enjoy WP:PRIMARYTOPIC status as those names are used in majority of English sources almost EXCLUSIVELY to discuss their pre-colonial settlements and history ONLY. And that natural disambiguation is what im rooting for as with these examples of ancient city states, Aegium instead of Aigio (historical polity), Chytri instead of Kythrea (historical polity), Didyma instead of Didim (historical polity), Korkyra instead of Corfu (historical polity), Lindus instead of Lindos (histotrical city), Philippi instead of Filippoi (historical polity), Phocaea instead of Foça (historical polity), Rhithymna instead of Rethymno (historical polity), Scyllaeum instead of Scilla (historical polity), Stymphalus instead of Stymfalia (historical polity), Tropolis instead of Tirebolu (historical polity). The list goes on. Now i dont know about their prevalence in English sources, but the ancient names are almost identical to their present names too and im sure the present names and spellings are also used significantly to refer to their early polities, but thats how they disambiguate the old from the new. They could all just be mentioned and merged in the present cities' history section, but their significance probably deserved for them a separate article. Anyway, i am not gonna push it if others think this would present problems in the future. But thats my take in all of this.--RioHondo (talk) 09:38, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

• Move instead to Butuan (historical polity) and Cebu/Sugbu (historical polity). The first choice of course actually would be to follow common usage in reliable academic sources. If there is no set WP:common name, we could use—IF known—the native term used at that period, but NB the native term for the entity itself, not one derived (=invented) from the native term for its ruler (because we simply don't know if ancient Filipinos actually called a realm after the title of its ruler in the fashion of kingdom < king, sultanate < sultan, duchy < duke). Thus remains the default solution, i.e. a neutral generic term which explains what are talking about, and "polity" is a good choice for that.

FWIW: one of our few sources, the Asia Society exibition website uses "Kingdom of Butuan" in its title, but "the polity known as Butuan" in the main text. This use of "kingdom" falls under the category of clickbait... –Austronesier (talk) 20:14, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.