Abstract
While colonial officials in Mindanao often succeeded in constructing a reified, homogeneous, and philosophically manageable Moro, these officials also encountered severe challenges to their imperial taxonomies and disruptive anomalies in an otherwise fluid historicist discourse. Though circumscribed within a narrative of primitivism, savagery, and uncontaminated potential, Filipino Muslims proved much more heterogeneous and complex than American imperialists would have liked. Moros exhibited certain cultural and historical characteristics that could not be ignored or overshadowed by colonial narratives and dramatic representations of primordial, untamed ignorance. Filipino Muslims often pressed the definitional parameters of “civilization” by challenging notions of an impoverished Moro