“Que los indios no puedan vender sus hijas para contraer matrimonio”: Understanding and Regulating Bridewealth and Brideservice in the Spanish Colonial Period of the Philippines

Abstract

In his seminal work on the process of hispanization in the first century and a half of Spanish rule in the Philippines, John Leddy Phelan concluded that the Spaniards had succeeded in Christianizing matrimony; however, he acknowledged that socioeconomic aspects of prehispanic marriage persisted in the first century of Spanish colonization, particularly those of brideprice and bride-gift. According to Phelan, these practices “smacked of fathers selling their daughters, perhaps against the latter’s will, to the highest bidder”.1 While Phelan differentiated between dowry and brideprice as Philippine indigenous practices, an examination of Spanish sources, ethnographic and otherwise, shows that what the Spaniards called ‘dowry’ (dote) corresponds to brideprice; that is, these two marriage prestations were actually the same. The application of European nomenclature obscured the meaning of the original indigenous referent (bugay in Bisaya and bigay-kaya in Tagalog, two Philippine languages), and so, like early modern Spanish authors in the field, Phelan appears to have confused these terms. This chapter problematizes the conceptual translation of indigenous marriage prestations. It explores the perspectives of moral theologians and clergymen, and traces the normative means, both ecclesiastical and secular, and their juridical and moral underpinnings, to make native customs conform to Catholic matrimonial law and values. Likewise, it examines normative literature and judicial sources to discern the indigenous response to these efforts at transformation in the late 17th to 18th century. In sum, it traces the ways in which the institutions of bugay/bigay-kaya were practised, interpreted, contested, and integrated into the colonial matrimonial order.