The Manóbos of Mindanáo / Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir

E-text prepared by Carl D. DuBois
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Throughout this monograph I have used the term eastern Mindanáo to include that part of Mindanáo that is east of the central Cordillera as far south as the headwaters of the River Libagánon, east of the River Tágum and its influent the Libagánon, and east of the gulf of Davao.

The word tribe is used in the sense in which Dean C. Worcester defines and uses it in his article on The non-Christian Tribes of Northern Luzon: 1
A division of a race composed of an aggregate of individuals of a kind and of a common origin, agreeing among themselves in, and distinguished from their congeners by physical characteristics, dress, and ornaments; the nature of the communities which they form; peculiarities of house architecture; methods of hunting, fishing, and carrying on agriculture; character and importance of manufacture; practices relative to war and the taking of heads of enemies; arms used in warfare; music and dancing, and marriage and burial customs; but not constituting a political unit subject to the control of any single individual nor necessarily speaking the same dialect.
1 Philip. Journ. Sci., 1: 803, 1906.

The word Manóbo seems to be a generic name for people of greatly divergent culture, physical type, and language. Thus it is applied to the people that dwell in the mountains of the lower half of Point San Agustin as well as to those people whose habitat is on the southern part of the Sarangani Peninsula. Those, again, that occupy the hinterland of Tuna Bay 2 come under the same designation. So it might seem that the word was originally used to designate the pagan as distinguished from the Mohammedanized people of Mindanáo, much as the name Harafóras or Alfúros was applied by the early writers to the pagans to distinguish them from the Moros.
2 Tuna Bay is on the southern coast of Mindanáo, about halfway between Sarangani Bay and Parang Bay.
In the Agúsan Valley the term manóbo is used very frequently by Christian and by Christianized peoples, and sometimes by pagans themselves, to denote that the individual in question is still unbaptized , whether he be tribally a Mandáya, a Mañgguáñgan, or of some other group. I have been told by Mandáyas on several occasions that they were still manóbo , that is, still unbaptized.