This volume is a comprehensive listing of reference sources for Philippine ethnology, excluding physical anthropology and de-emphasizing folklore and linguistics. It is published as part of the East-West Bibliographic Series. This listing includes books, journal articles, mimeographed papers, and official publications selected on the basis of the ratings of sixty-two Philippine specialists. Several titles were added to fill the need for material in certain areas.

"Anyone who has been to Manila, Bali, or Bangkok is aware of the plight of the locals who despise and yet want the presence of tourists. . . . Ness focuses on the Philippines . . . to examine the delicate balance between preserving one's way of life while being open to the increasing demands of tourism."--Choice

Ethnography in the Raw describes the author’s encounters with the Philippine family into which he has married, his wife’s friends and acquaintances, and their lives in a remote rural village in the rice basin of Luzon, about 130 miles northeast of Manila. The book links detailed descriptions of his Philippine family with cultural practices such as circumcision, marriage and cockfights combined with theoretical musings on the concepts of sacrifice, social exchange, patron-client relations, food, and religious symbolism. It is both anthropological fieldwork ‘in the raw,’ and an incisive analysis of contemporary Philippine society and culture.

"To read the book is to appreciate the highly contingent, provisional, oblique, open-ended way in which people try to make "sense" of another culture."—Resil B. Mojares, Philippine Graphic "This book is an interestingly complex ethnography that approaches the self-critical dialectical ethnography called for two decades ago....It is a welcome contribution to postmodernist theory and to the ethnography of the Visayas."—Ronald Provencher, Journal of Asian Studies