A Patchwork of Customs: Anthropology and “Unwritten” Laws in the US Colonial Philippines

In 1919, American and Filipino colonial officials established a research committee to document and study Philippine customs that carried "the virtue and force of law." Designed to address legal and administrative issues, the committee sought to render "unwritten" laws legible to the colonial state, intending to selectively eradicate some while incorporating others into local governance. In 1931, after more than a decade of haphazard work, the committee produced the nine-volume sourcebook still known as the Beyer-Holleman Collection of Original Sources in Philippine Customary Law. This paper reconstructs the making of this collection from 1919 to 1931, focusing on the critical role of H. Otley Beyer, an anthropology professor at the University of the Philippines. In coordination with Dutch scholar Frederik Holleman (who visited Manila in 1931), Beyer drew on his student-gathered ethnographies and used his classificatory system to arrange and extract the massive array of sources, redirecting the committee's work from legal codification to cultural documentation. While voluminous and comprehensive, the Beyer-Holleman collection proved to be fragmented and impractical, reflecting the complex diversity of local practices as well as the limits of Beyer's ethnography. At the same time, the assembled sources captured how university students from across the archipelago observed and recorded the "unwritten" laws practiced in their hometowns, providing insight into Filipinos negotiating cultural change under U.S. rule.