As literary works created in the setting of a society where the resources for

economic subsistence—land, water, and forest—were communally owned, the

oral literature of the precolonial Filipinos bore the marks of the community. The

subject matter was invariably the common experience of the people constituting a

village—food-gathering, creatures and objects of nature, work in the home, field,

forest, or sea, caring for children, etc.1