At the end of her book, Oona Paredes writes that the contemporary Lumad of Mindanao ‘certainly do not let the outside world define who they are, much less who they ought to be. Nor do they struggle with the things that bog down outsiders (lowlanders, scholars, state officials) who, in the process of trying to understand the Lumad, obsess over what is culturally ‘authentic’ and what is not' (p. 175). This insightful observation regarding Lumad agency and their sophisticated awareness about the world in which they live is the subtle thread that underlies and solidifies the main argument of this historical ethnography about the Lumad. Using a varied set of historical narratives, Paredes presents a dynamic picture of the encounters between the Lumad and diverse authorities throughout the Spanish colonial period in Mindanao.

Paredes divides the book into six convenient chapters. In the first chapter she emphasises the need to analyse the political space of the archipelago from outside of colonially constructed centres reinforced by the nation-state in order to fully understand the encounter between the Lumad and the Spaniards. In the second chapter, Paredes demonstrates this point by exploring the complex socio-political relationship between Spanish missionaries and the Lumad by examining the multivalent meanings of blood pacts between both groups. In doing so, she portrays an encounter between two worlds completely unknown to each other. Paredes delves more deeply into this encounter between the Spanish and the Lumad in the third chapter as she considers the conversion of another Lumad group, the Kagayanon, and the development of strong social and emotional ties between this group and the Fathers of the Order of the Recoletos. In contrast, Paredes probes the conflicts and tensions also generated by the coexistence between the Lumad and Spaniards in Mindanao through the analysis of the Caraga revolt of 1631 and the treachery of María Campan in the fourth chapter. In the fifth chapter Paredes further investigates the tensions of coexistence with a different actor, the distant colonial state in Manila. Paredes uses three documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show how the Lumad resolved these tensions and conflicts by harmonising their needs with those of the colonial state while keeping their autonomy. In the final chapter, Paredes studies the silent legacies of the colonial encounter that pervaded Lumad culture.

Paredes lays the foundation for her analysis of the sources by taking the localisation theory and cultural matrix developed by O.W. Wolters as a point of departure for her inquiry. Paredes’s use of colonial sources adds another level of understanding as it describes Lumad actions and reactions towards the Spanish presence by using a cultural lens. By contrasting Lumad and Spanish cultural perspectives, Paredes co-opts the colonial documentation. In doing so, she demonstrates that these colonial sources are not just the foundation for understanding colonisation, but can also shed some light on Lumad cultural agency. Her use of the sources portrays a fuller awareness amongst both groups during their interactions. Therefore, by considering both Lumad and Spanish colonial cultural perspectives equally, she is able to convey that even though the Spaniards might have had a paternalistic vision of the indigenous population of Mindanao, the Lumad in turn had a solid image of themselves. In sum, through her discerning use of the documentation, she succeeds in showing the dynamic and confident way in which the Lumad dealt vis-à-vis the aggressive Spanish colonial world.

Paredes's greatest achievement in this book is perhaps in her presenting of the complex and kaleidoscopic view of the actors, their context, and interactions. Without negating the brutal and patriarchal background to the colonial experience in Mindanao, she stresses the close ties developed between the Lumad and some of the Spaniards they encountered. By contrasting the Lumad cultural values with those of the Spaniards throughout her analysis, Paredes is able to arrive at that difficult ‘third dimension’ in writing about colonial history. This third dimension is not about the stark dichotomies and totalising views generated by colonial and then national historiography between the colonisers and the colonised, but the reality of daily interactions between human beings. This reality is depicted from a spectrum of social grey areas, which include appreciation, loyalty, and respect alongside tensions and conflicts between both groups, thus giving a more complex human dimension and not just political agenda. For instance, when she explores the revolt of Caraga, aside from explaining the conflict, Paredes also reconstructs the complex close relationship between the different datus (chiefs) and the Spaniards, as well as the tensions among the different indigenous chiefs themselves, some of whom were loyal to the Spaniards. In so doing, Paredes is showing a record of existing alliances that according to a subaltern vision would be impossible. Thus, she transforms Mindanao into the central stage of the Lumad, portraying the Lumad as the main actors and the Spaniards as guests, sometimes welcome and sometimes unwelcome, but nonetheless present.

A mountain of difference is a must-read book for a better understanding of not only how the different levels of the Spanish colonial system operated in the Philippines, but also for a deeper understanding of how groups on the edge of the colonial world negotiated and operated, ultimately displaying an agency that colonial historiography on the archipelago and the nation-state have not acknowledged thus far. This book signals the need for this type of attention to the periphery: it is maybe time to write a colonial history of the archipelago from the territorial margins of the colonial sphere, to seek new historical centres.