Castes and classes

Chamorro performers in traditional dress

Chamorro society was divided into two main castes and continued to be so for well over a century after the Spanish first arrived. According to the historical records provided by Europeans such as Father Charles Le Gobien, there appeared to be racial differences between the subservient Manachang caste, and the higher Chamor[r]i, the Manachang being described as shorter, darker-skinned, and physically less hardy than the Chamori. The Chamori caste was subdivided into the upper-middle class Achoti/Acha'ot and the highest, administrative Matua/Matao class. Achoti could graduate to Matua, and Matua could be reduced to Achoti, but Manachang were born and died as such and had no recourse to improve their status. Members of the Manachang and the Chamori were not permitted to intermingle. All three classes performed physical labor, but had different specified duties.[7]

[8] Le Gobien theorized that Chamorro society comprised the geographical convergence of peoples of different ethnic origins. This idea may be supportable by the evidence of linguistic characteristics of the Chamorro language and social customs. Father Pierre Coomans wrote of the practice among Chamorro women of teeth blackening/dental lacquering (also a custom among the Japanese and Vietnamese), which they considered beautiful as a distinction apart from animals.[9] Fernberger wrote in his account of the Chamorro that "penis pins" were employed as a chastity measure for young males, a practice similarly employed by inhabitants at least as far south as Indonesia.

Charles Le Gobien (1653 – 5 March 1708) was a French Jesuit writer, founder of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses a collection of reports from Jesuit missionaries in China. It is a major source of information for the history of Catholic missions and life in China in those times.

Interpretive Essay: Linguistic issues and theories

The origin of Guam’s indigenous people has been a matter of considerable speculation for more than a century. Scholars have developed theories about Chamorro origins based on various evidence: physical (pottery shards, DNA, etc.), ocean movement and language.

Based on what is now known from linguistic studies coupled with the modern dating techniques of archaeology, scholars can say with some certainty that:

• The original Chamorros spoke an Austronesian language that was an immediate descendant of Malayo-Polynesian or Extra-Formosan, the language that developed in the northern Philippines following the first migration out of Taiwan into the Philippines.

• The earliest Chamorros sailed the 1,300 miles from the northern Philippines to the Marianas in the first major, open-sea migration in the history of mankind.

• Chamorro is not close to any Philippine language, or to the Philippine group of languages as a whole, neither does it subgroup with any language group to the south of the Philippines.

Placing Chamorro proves difficult

Language is one of the key sources of information that enables scholars to draw conclusions about where people came from and to whom they may be related. This information, supplemented by the modern dating techniques of archaeology, can provide us with a fairly reliable picture of prehistory, although access to new data and dating techniques often require the prehistorian to revise theories that have become popular and are frequently cited.

Chamorro is one of the more than 1,200 members of the great Austronesian language family, a fact that has long been recognized. Austronesian is the family of languages that first developed in Taiwan some 5,000 years ago, and spread from there through the Philippines, to Indonesia and Malaysia, and ultimately into all the habitable islands of the Pacific, with some groups settling in mainland Southeast Asia and as far east as Madagascar.

The difficulty in determining the position of Chamorro relative to other Austronesian languages is at least partly the result of the complex history of contact with other languages, both Austronesian and non-Austronesian, which has taken place at an ever-increasing rate over the last 3,500 years or more since the islands were first settled.

These contacts have ranged from chance settlement by shipwrecked or drifting sailors from Micronesian islands to the south and east, or from any of a number of Philippine islands to the west or Indonesian islands to the south, to interaction with trade networks with other island groups, all of which have left their imprint on the language spoken by the indigenous population of the Marianas.

Impact of colonization

In the historical period, colonization under Spanish, German, Japanese and American governments along with decimation of the local population have had drastic effects upon the inherited language, especially in the lexicon, but also in the forms of words and the grammar. Probably thousands of words which were once part of the language of the early migrants have been lost, being replaced by words commonly used by the colonizers.

When attempting to determine the origins of the Chamorro-speaking people, it is a relatively easy task to identify and eliminate from comparison those terms which obviously have their source in Japanese or European languages. It is not so easy, however, to distinguish words that must have been inherited from the vocabulary of the first Chamorros from words that have been adopted into the language from other Austronesian languages.

For example for 150 years, starting in 1575, the Manila Galleon stopped annually in Guam for reprovisioning on its trips across the Pacific between Mexico and the Philippines, bringing with it not only commercial products for sale or barter, but Filipinos speaking a number of different languages, terms from which inevitably found their way into the vocabularies of the local Chamorros. The Spanish, in order to reinforce their own troops from Mexico, even recruited a company of Kapampangan-speaking soldiers from the Philippines, many of whom married local Chamorro women and introduced words from their language into Chamorro.

The techniques of historical-comparative linguistics, however, provide a principled method for separating out such borrowed terms from those that are inherited from the ancestral language. In order to understand these techniques it is necessary to briefly outline the principles upon which they are based.

All languages change

There are two basic assumptions upon which the principles and procedures of historical-comparative linguistics are based. The first of these is that all languages change over time. This seems a fairly obvious assumption when one compares the languages of grandparents with their grandchildren, but the cumulative results of such inter-generational change typically result in very different forms of words and grammar over periods of hundreds of years, as can easily be attested by comparing say the language of Chaucer or Shakespeare with the English spoken today. The expectation then is that Chamorro words that are directly inherited from the earliest ancestors who first set foot in the Marianas thousands of years ago are likely to be very different in form from the way they are spoken today.

At the point when ancient Chamorros first arrived, it can be assumed that they were speaking the same language as their relatives and friends whom they left behind. In the generations that followed, however, the changes that took place in the language of the homeland were independent of the changes that took place in the language of the Chamorros. This would have resulted in what would have been dialectal differences over a few hundred years, but ultimately, should the descendants of the travelers have returned to their homeland and attempted to communicate with the descendants of those who stayed behind, they would not have been mutually comprehensible. The two forms of speech would have become different languages, or “daughter” languages of their parent, or “proto-language”. Thus English and German are two of the daughter languages of their common parent language, Proto-Germanic.

Languages change systematically

The second basic assumption is that the sounds of a language change over time in regular and systematic ways, enabling linguists to establish sets of corresponding sounds between languages belonging to the same language family. Thus words in Chamorro with “f” correspond to similar words in Tagalog with “p”, while those with “p” correspond to Tagalog words with “b”. They can discover sets of words in these languages which must have had a common origin in the parent language because of their corresponding sounds and because they share the same or similar meanings. Such forms are known as “cognates”.

The discovery of such cognate sets enables the linguist to determine the sound system of the proto-language and to postulate the forms of the words in the parent language from which the daughter languages developed. This is not to say that idiosyncratic or irregular changes do not occur, they do, but frequently it is possible to determine regular processes by which the apparently irregular forms developed.

Words that are not inherited from the parent language, but have been adopted into the language by “borrowing” from some related language are often identifiable because they have not undergone the regular sound changes that characterize inherited words. Thus Chamorro babui ‘pig’ is clearly a borrowing of a word from one of the Philippine languages, many of which have babuy ‘pig’, because otherwise it would be pronounced in Chamorro as papui.

When languages share a set of sound changes or other innovations that have taken place, they can be grouped together into a subgroup, the members of which are more closely related to one another than to any language outside of that subgroup. So when comparing Chamorro with other Austronesian languages, the question that must be asked is whether there is a subgroup of Austronesian languages to which Chamorro is most closely related? If so, it should be possible to identify the homeland from which the original migrants set sail in their voyage of discovery to the Mariana Islands.

Some of the sound changes that characterize inherited Chamorro words provide evidence that Chamorro is in fact an Austronesian language.

Chamorro as an Austronesian language

There have been several studies which have focused on the systematic way sounds have changed in Chamorro which differentiate it from other Austronesian languages. The first of these studies was by the American philologist Charles Everett Conant, who spent many years in the Philippines at the beginning of the twentieth century. In articles published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1907 and in 1911, and in Anthropos in 1911, he noted the relationship of Chamorro to Philippine and Indonesian languages, and attempted to describe how Chamorro consonants had changed over time.

The next major study which included a description of sound changes in Chamorro was by Hermann Costenoble, who spent his childhood years from 1905-1913 in Guam and grew up

speaking the language. Writing in German under the tutelage of the great Austronesian scholar, Otto Dempwolff, he produced in 1940 a volume, Die Chamorro Sprache.

This work was ground-breaking for its time, but has since been superseded by more recent studies which have benefited from a fuller understanding of the nature of the parent language, Proto-Austronesian, and the far more extensive set of reconstructed forms with which comparisons can be drawn. More recently, a study by Robert Blust of the University of Hawai`i, entitled “Chamorro historical phonology” appeared in the journal Oceanic Linguistics in 2000.

This work provides a description of the sound system of Chamorro as it is currently spoken and gives evidence to show how each of the sounds has developed in Chamorro from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP), the parent of all the Austronesian languages outside of Taiwan, spoken around 2,000 BC, and which can be shown to probably be the immediate ancestor of Chamorro. (This parent language is also referred to in some descriptions as Proto-Extra-Formosan.)

Vowels

Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP) had four vowels: i, u, a and e. In Chamorro the first three of these sounds remained unchanged, although in some positions in a word, “i” became “e”, and “u” became “o”. PMP “e” was not a sound like Chamorro “e”, but rather a sound pronounced similar to the vowel in English ‘hurt’, sometimes referred to as “schwa.”

In Chamorro, this sound also became “u” (and in some positions “o”). Examples: PMP Rebek > gupu ‘to fly’, beRas > pugas ‘husked rice’, tebuh > tupu ‘sugarcane, qatep > atof ‘roof’, paniki > fanihi ‘flying fox’, etc.

Consonants

Proto-Malayo-Polynesian consonants developed regularly in Chamorro as follows. (Not all PMP consonants are shown here and many details of development are left unstated; however they serve to indicate the regular nature of the sound changes that have taken place in the language from its proto-language.

p > f: pasu > fasu ‘cheek’; paqit > fa’et ‘salty; bitter’

t > t: telu > tulu ‘three’; mata > mata ‘eye’

c > s: ceŋceŋ > songsong ‘stopper, plug’

k > h (before a vowel): kutu > hutu ‘louse’; laki > lahi ‘man, male’

k > (at the end of a word): tasik > tasi ‘sea’; Rebek > gupu ‘to fly’

q > ’ : ma-qasiq > ma-’ase’ ‘merciful’; Rumaq > guma’ ‘house’

b > p: bulan > pulan ‘moon’; babaq > papa’ ‘down, below’

d > h: danum > hanom ‘water’ sida > siha ‘they, them’

z > ch: zalan > chalan ‘road, path’; quzan > uchan ‘rain’

j > ’ : pajay > fa’i ‘rice in the field’; lalej > lalo’ ‘housefly’

g > g: ganas > ganas ‘appetite’; getus > gutos ‘snap, break off’

m >m: lima > lima ‘five’; dalem > halom ‘in, into, inside, enter’

n > n: nepuq > nufo’ ‘scorpion fish’; paniki > fanihi ‘flying fox’

ñ > ñ: ñamuk > ñamu ‘mosquito’; laña > laña ‘oil (generic)’

ŋ > ng: deŋeR > hungok ‘hear’; tuqelaŋ > to’lang ‘bone’

s > s: susu > susu ‘breast’; nusnus > nosnos ‘cuttle fish, squid’

R > g: Rebek > gupu ‘to fly’; zuRuq > chugo’ ‘sap, juice’

Subgrouping Hypotheses

From the above it is clear that Chamorro is an Austronesian language. There are hundreds of words that probably directly reflect words that have been reconstructed to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian. Knowing this however doesn’t tell us who the closest relatives of Chamorro are, nor where the original Chamorros came from.

Subgrouping claims

There are at least four main claims regarding the subgrouping relationship of Chamorro. These are:

Chamorro is part of the Philippine family of languages. Chamorro is most closely related to certain languages in Indonesia. Chamorro is most closely related to some of the Austronesian languages in Taiwan. Chamorro is not closely related to any other subgroups within the Austronesian language

family.

http://guampedia.com/origin-of-guam%E2%80%99s-indigenous-people/

Origin of Guam’s Indigenous People

The island archipelago that includes the Marianas was formed between 25 and 50 million years ago as two plates of oceanic crust, the Pacific and the Philippine, collided and touched off volcanic activity. The resulting volcanic mountains, if measured from the seafloor, are as much as 5,000 feet taller than Mt. Everest, which stands 29,028 feet above sea level.

Archaeological records indicate that people first inhabited these rugged volcanic mountaintops as early as 2,000 B.C. Those first settlers came from Southeast Asia; the language they spoke and customs they kept bears similarities to those of their contemporaries in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Though it is possible that they first came upon the islands after getting lost navigating the waters of the western Pacific Ocean, in time, the people who became known as the Chamorro distinguished themselves as accomplished mariners and fishermen as well as skilled horticulturalists.

Society organized itself at the village level with two or three levels of social rank. Family structures were matrilineal and women were the heads of households, a feature credited for keeping Chamorro culture alive despite attempts of colonizers to abolish it starting in the 16th Century.

Chamorro islanders would traverse local waters in vast canoes called sakman, the distinctive triangular sails of which would lead one of the first westerners ever to see the Chamorro, the Spanish explorer Ferdinand Magellan, to originally give the Marianas the name "Las Islas de las Velas Latinas," ("The Islands of the Latin Sails") because of their resemblance to the small vessels he knew from the Mediterranean Sea near his home. The native sailors had no charts or compasses, but instead used the positions of stars committed to memory and their knowledge of waves and clouds to guess the direction of the current.

Back on their home islands, the Chamorros underwent a distinct cultural transformation some 1,000 years ago. It manifest itself in a new architectural expression, the latte stones constructed at Chamorro homes that would become the namesake of the period that lasted from then until the first contact with the Spanish in 1521. The two-piece structures were

columns and caps made of coral limestone. They were dragged several miles from quarries to houses. At the bases of latte stones, the Chamorro buried their dead and their valuables. Among a people known to have practiced ancestor worship, the stones were sacred and to this day, they remain a symbol of the peoples of the Marianas.

Though the Chamorro prized their canoes and jewelry as personal possessions, their concepts of ownership were different than those of their first Spanish visitors. That culture clash set the tone for what was to follow in the days, months and years after Chamorro warriors paddled out to greet Magellan, their first Western visitor, on March 6, 1521 as he dropped anchor off the island of Guam.

http://sio.ucsd.edu/marianas/history/chamorro.cfm Marianas Expedition History: The Chamorro

Gender Roles and Statuses

Division of Labor by Gender. Chamorro culture had a balance in gender roles. Power within the clan belonged to both the oldest son and the oldest daughter. Women traditionally held power over the household, while men conducted affairs in the public sphere, including hunting and fishing. The oldest daughter cared for her parents in their older years. Three centuries of colonialism have created much change, particularly in the public sphere. Men dominate political offices, and women are leaders in many social, religious, and cultural organizations.

The Relative Status of Women and Men. After more than three centuries of colonial rule and the dominance of the Roman Catholic church on Guam, the relative status of men and women has changed in favor of higher status for men's roles. Under both Spanish and American rule, men were selected over women to hold positions in any public capacity, whether in the government, business, or church. Women's power in the household has largely been maintained through their control over familial resources, including the paychecks of husbands and children, and the labor resources of all family members. In the past half century, women have successfully found acceptance as elected officials and leaders of numerous government and civic organizations, although men still vastly outnumber women in positions of political leadership.

Marriage, Family, and Kinship

Marriage. The groom's family sponsors the marriage, providing the bride with her wedding dress and other items of value. In addition, they throw a party to demonstrate their ability to provide for their new daughter. Traditionally, upon marriage, the woman was expected to relocate to her husband's clan land, although today this practice often is forgone in favor of whatever housing is available.

Domestic Unit. The extended family or clan, is the core of society. The domestic unit can include grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, cousins, and other relatives. The

practice of poksai, a form of adoption, is common. In this system, childless women may raise a niece or nephew and grandparents may exercise parental control over a grandchild.

Inheritance. Sons and daughters generally inherit land and other material possessions equally from both parents, with protections extended to the youngest child and any unmarried children.

Kin Groups. The closest kin group consists of first and second cousins from the mother's and father's lines and may include godparents and their children. The system of clan names allows Chamorros to navigate relationships despite an abundance of duplicate surnames. Clan names reflect kinship along male and female lineages in ways that surnames do not. Persons with different surnames may share a common clan name, revealing a relationship along the lineage. Generally, people place priority in the mother's clan line.

Socialization

Infant Care. While biological parents and grandparents are the traditional providers of infant care, the larger extended family provides a network of assistance. People show great affection to infants, frequently smelling and lightly pinching, squeezing, and biting babies. Chamorros believe that feelings of matgodai have such spiritually powerful effects that failing to demonstrate affection can make a baby cranky or cause illness.

Child Rearing and Education. Nearly all the major events in a young person's life revolve around celebrations in clan circles. Children are socialized from birth to show respect to their relatives. While the extended family provides a network of assistance for child rearing, some working parents place their children in day care or preschool. There is mandatory schooling from ages five to sixteen.

Higher Education. The University of Guam is the only four-year accredited institution of higher learning in the western Pacific. Most of its students are graduates of Guam's high schools.

Read more: http://www.everyculture.com/Ge-It/Guam.html#ixzz2t9BiZQKA

Social ranking

The social ranking of individuals, whether by age, gender or social status, has always been important in Chamorro society.  In pre-Spanish times, social status dictated occupations and activities, living situations, marriage rules, social etiquette and taboos, and access to power, wealth and prestige in the form of control over land and ocean resources.   One’s status usually was dictated by the social rank of the family or clan into which an individual was born.

As with many other societies throughout Micronesia, traditional Chamorro society was divided into matrilineal clans comprised of family members that worked together to sustain

and promote the interests of the group.  Clan alliances were continually forged or dissolved through activities of intermarriage or warfare in an effort to ensure access to resources on land and sea, as well as to increase social status.  Clan leaders were usually the oldest male and female family members (known as maga’låhi and maga’håga, respectively) whose age and experience not only obligated them to care for the welfare of the clan, but also afforded them a certain level of respect by younger clan members or from others of lower social status.  Councils composed of high-ranked men and women presided over the affairs of the clan, with power and authority arising from the lineage of women.

Castes vs. classes

Chamorro clans were divided into two distinct, ranked social castes.  Social castes are different from social classes in that individuals are born into a particular caste and their status, therefore, cannot be changed.  Social classes, on the other hand, are more fluid and members can move between classes.  The upper caste was known as chamorri, and the lower caste was known as manachang.   Movement in between these castes, such as through marriage, was prohibited.  Concubines or other relationships could be maintained only within one’s social class.   In addition, the chamorri caste was divided into an upper noble class called matao and a middle, or demi-noble class, known as acha’ot.

While the social stratification in Chamorro society was rigid, it is not entirely clear if the middle class acha’ot and the lower caste manachang comprised a commoner class, or if the middle class was a kind of lesser nobility.  It is suggested, however, that the acha’ot class had more in common with the matao, with some acha’ot having relatives of matao ranking, or who were once matao that were banished to the acha’ot class because of some cultural infraction.

Nevertheless, early accounts describe the chamorri and manachang as occupying separate settlement areas and engaging in specific activities and behaviors that befitted their particular places in the social hierarchy of Chamorro society.

In general, the upper caste chamorri occupied areas along the coast with easy access to the reefs, lagoons and the open ocean.  The manachang, by contrast, lived further inland in the hills and jungles of the islands.  The chamorri were warriors, fishermen, craftsmen, artisans and village leaders, while the manachang were servants and village laborers.  Although the manachang could not own land, they were not slaves and were still able to cultivate it and grow food for themselves as well as for the chamorri.

Fray Juan Pobre de Zamora, a Spanish Franciscan friar who lived among the Chamorros in 1602 prior to Christianization on the neighboring island of Rota in 1602 for several months, pointed out this situation and described the good treatment of the manachang by the chamorri and the deep respect the manachang had, in turn, for the upper class.  The Jesuit missionary Fr. Diego Luis de San Vitores in 1668 also described the esteem the commoners had for their aristocracy, including the distinctions between upper, middle and lower lineages.

By the time of French explorer Louis Claude de Freycinet’s arrival in 1819, much had changed in the Mariana Islands under Catholic and Spanish colonial rule.  However, Freycinet included in his account of the native islanders a description of the traditional social customs related to caste, class and social status, such as deferential behaviors of manachang in the presence of matao and taboos on specific cultural activities.

More recent descriptions based on Freycinet’s account of traditional Chamorro social structure continue to emphasize the specific behaviors and dynamics between individuals of the different social castes and classes, but they also pay attention to the shifting power dynamics and the emergence of new social class structures from the influence of Spanish colonialism and the Catholic Church.

This includes the rise of the principalia and eventually the mannakhilo’ as a new social class of high ranking individuals and families, and the mannakpåpa’, or low-ranking social class.  Unlike traditional social rankings based on matrilineal lines of inheritance, the rankings of mannakhilo’ and mannakpåpa’ were more representative of political and economic affiliations with Spanish administrators, church officials, and later, the American naval government.

Cunningham, Lawrence. “The Ancient Chamorros of Guam.“ In Guam History: Perspectives, Vol. 1. Editored by Lee D. Carter, William L. Wuerch and Rosa Roberto Carter. Mangilao, GU: University of Guam Richard F. Taitano Micronesian Area Research Center, 1997.