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lagunabayfables's review
3.0
Three stars, I am never going to read a book written by white people for the Philippines ever again. It was good in terms of showing more obscure aspects of Philippine mythology, especially ones present in the 19th century but have since faded. My issue with this is that it was pretty vague. For example, it would say that a certain deity was “the god of x group of people” and not go into detail about a deific domain. Most of the time, it was just a bunch of names with no context. I did learn some things, but they warrant further research because this, again, was written by a white man and edited by a white man. It lost a lot of its cultural context and it didn’t always understand the language (for example, it put different tenses of the same word under separate entries, which was just confusing). Also, there was a section near the end called “Philippine Tribes and Languages” which I had to skim through because it used several slurs + even managed to sneak in a negative Chinese stereotype. Yikes, but I guess it was to be expected from the time period…
I recommend reading this book only if you already have prior experience with researching Philippine mythology and if you are fluent in Filipino.
Last note: the illustrations were PHENOMENAL.
I recommend reading this book only if you already have prior experience with researching Philippine mythology and if you are fluent in Filipino.
Last note: the illustrations were PHENOMENAL.
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