Malay Race - Philippine Context

Philippine Context

In the Philippines, many Filipinos consider the term "Malay" to refer to the indigenous population of the country as well as the indigenous population of neighboring countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. This misconception is due in part to American anthropologist H. Otley Beyer who proposed that the Filipinos were actually Malays who migrated from Malaysia and Indonesia. This idea was in turn propagated by Filipino historians and is still taught in many schools. However, the prevalent consensus among contemporary anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists actually proposes the reverse; namely that the ancestors of the Austronesian peoples of the Sunda Islands, Madagascar, and Polynesia had originally migrated south from the Philippines during the prehistoric period from an origin in Taiwan.