The Tasaday Controversy: Assessing the Evidence

Abstract

In 1971 a small band of foragers in the southern Philippines became widely publicized in the media as a pristine group of Stone Age peoples who lacked knowledge of the outside world. Wearing only leaves for clothing and dwelling in caves, the reportedly knew nothing of agriculture and subsisted on wild plants. By 1974, after some brief anthropological investigations, Philippine authorities restricted further visits until 1986. Foreign journalists then re-entered the area, and the once again made headlines. This time, though, their rainforest lifestyle was denounced as a hoax rather than a rare anthropological discovery, a change that was due to an unfortunate discretion in attire. who were found wearing clothes and living in modest houses one day were a week later found to be hanging around caves wearing leaves. Worse yet, some were wearing underwear. Public and academic outrage began. This volume is a collection of essays stemming from the 1989 special symposium on the Tasaday Controversy held at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting. Commissioned to review the evidence concerning the authenticity of the lifestyle originally reported for the Tasaday, these essays instead illustrate that a simple resolution of these issues is elusive. Whereas the popular press formulated the controversy in polarized terms (for example, are they a primitive tribe or a modern Piltdown hoax?), Thomas Headland points out that this issue is not whether the are a hoax (after all, they exist) but the degree of primitiveness and isolation that characterized their lifestyle in the early 1970s. Most of the essays either support or cast doubt on whether were making stone tools, living in caves, or practicing a non-agricultural lifestyle. Others focus more on the details of the hoax itself-allegedly perpetrated by Manuel Elizalde, the head of PANAMIN (the Philippine government agency in charge of national minorities) and original discoverer of the Tasaday. volume is organized into several parts and includes an informative, well-written introduction and conclusion by Thomas Headland. Part One is titled The Skeptics, and contains four articles. best of these is Gerald Berreman's paper The Tasaday: Stone Age Survivors or Space Age Flakes?, which takes the position that the were lowland, house-dwelling, agricultural villagers who were induced (duped? bribed? coerced?) by Manuel Elizalde to act out image of a paleolithic way of life in caves so as to periodically deceive visiting scientists. Berreman suggests three motives for such a theatrical performance: 1) Elizalde's desire to exploit the forest resources of the area; 2) desire to exploit the for own political gain; and 3) his craving for acclaim, or, more broadly, widely remarked strange personality (p. 31). He also makes the important observation that at least three anthropologists with Ph.D.s who were allowed to visit the during the early years (Robert Fox, Frank Lynch, and David Barradas) all eventually expressed reservations about Elizalde's motives.