I´ve been
fooled twice by the strange and wonderful tale of the Tasaday. As a teenager, I
believed that the story was real. And later, I believed (like everyone else)
that of course it was a crude hoax. The real story, alas, is much more
complicated. But then, that´s to be expected, is it not?
The link
above goes to a classical NOVA documentary about the Tasaday aired in 1993. The
story, set on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, started already in
1971, when Philippine government official Manuel Elizalde “discovered” a
mysterious tribal people living in the rainforest. Known as the Tasaday, the natives
lived on a Stone Age level and were super-primitive, having no tools, virtually
no clothing, no knowledge about horticulture or even hunting, no religion and
no rituals. They picked frogs and crabs with their bare hands, lived in caves,
and had extremely crude stone tools. (They *did* know how to make fire,
though.) Above all, they had no contact with the outside world, despite living
only a three hour walk from the nearest farming village. The Tasaday became an
overnight sensation, being seen as a remnant of humanity´s deep Paleolithic
past. Until 1986, when new reports from the area rather indicated that the
whole thing was a monumental hoax, orchestrated by Elizalde, and that the “Stone
Age natives” were really paid actors from the neighboring farm villages…
(Elizalde had fled the Philippines when long-time President Ferdinand Marcos
was overthrown by the democratic opposition, thereby making it possible for
independent reporters to reach the Tasaday area without being chaperoned.)
There the
matter could have ended…except that it didn´t. The NOVA documentary interviews
several anthropologists who studied the Tasaday during the 1970´s, and they are
unconvinced by the hoax argument. For instance, the Tasaday language is distinct
from those of neighboring peoples, and has almost no foreign loan words, nor
words relating to agriculture. How likely is it that the Tasaday (including the
children) could have systematically excluded all such words from their everyday
speech in order to bolster the hoax? They also seemed familiar with the caves
(again, including the children), also strange if they were really
house-dwellers from a farming community. The documentary reaches the conclusion
that the Tasaday, in a sense, were both a hoax and the real thing. Many of the
concrete statements about them in the international media were grossly
exaggerated. Elizalde probably did use them for PR purposes. For instance, they
*did* have hunting technology. On the other hand, the Tasaday really were a
separate community, not simply paid actors playing out a part.
It seems
that the Tasaday once were farmers, indeed, they may have belonged to the
neighboring Manobo people. At some point during the 19th century,
the ancestors of the Tasaday took to the rain forest, perhaps in order to
escape slave-raiders. Thus, they were not a Paleolithic remnant, but rather
fugitives from a very modern calamity. After 200 years as hunters and
gatherers, their language had inevitably changed to reflect their social
transformation, and their isolation can best be described as a survival
strategy. NOVA calls them “secondary primitives”. Their play-acting, but also
their later statements that it was all a hoax, are probably also part of the
same survival strategy. Today, the Tasaday are learning agriculture from their
Manobo neighbors and attend Christian churches, while still feeling comfortable
as semi-nude hunters and gatherers. In a sense, I suppose you could say they
have retrieved their agency…
Link to an
article by Thomas N Headland, also interviewed in the documentary.
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