Tasaday

With Tasaday were referred to a the tropical rainforest surviving group of people near the mountain of the same in the south of the island of Mindanao in the Philippines . The place is located in the Daguma Mountains not far from Lake Sebu in the province of South Cotabato . The story of the alleged discovery of this group at the beginning of the 1970s, which was presented to the world as the “ Stone Age tribe”, is now considered a hoax. What was meant was a horde of hunters isolated from the outside world , who fed on wild plants, fruits, honey and crabs and frogs caught with their bare hands, knew no metal tools, allegedly lived in caves and clothed themselves with leaves. Because there were just two dozen people who came to be known as Tasaday, it was more likely to be referred to as a horde than a tribe. The competent authority PANAMIN forbade a number of serious anthropologists to conduct field research, including Professor Zeus Salazar, who was trained at the Sorbonne . Since April 1986 at the latest, there has been international discussion as to whether the discovery was a fraud. The manner in which serious investigations were hindered and critical questions were regularly ignored suggests a deliberate disinformation on the part of the competent authority.

Beginning of the debate on fantasy information

The discovery had started when the Swiss journalist and ethnologist Oswald Iten published his revelatory story The Tasaday - a Philippine Stone Age hoax on April 12, 1986 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung . At that time, apart from a few scientists, the international public still believed that the Tasaday Stone Age tribe had been discovered in the Philippine rainforest in June 1971. However, Iten revealed that the jungle people were not collectors but lived on cultivated plants and thus drew the displeasure of those who believed the story of the discovery. Some of the Tasaday had revealed to the Swiss that they had to dress up as Stone Age hunters during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos . The photos of people dressed in orchid leaves who lived in caves had helped shape the international image of the Philippines from the 1970s until the end of the dictatorship. The images of the "Gentle Tasaday" ("The Gentle Tasaday", John Nance, 1975), who did not even know a word for war in their language, distracted from Marcos' dictatorship, which is viewed very critically today.

Global impact of the first Tasaday reports

The Marcos regime, with the help of its US allies, successfully propagated the alleged discovery as a sensation all over the world, while in the Philippines this story initially attracted little interest. Only the Manila Daily Mirror had space on page 14 to report the Tasaday in June 1971. The event was later referred to as the “anthropological discovery of the century”. The alleged discoverer Manuel Elizalde , the controversial head of the Philippine authority PANAMIN (Presidential Assistance on National Minorities), was able to fly in the Italian film actress Gina Lollobrigida as well as the Atlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh . After their respective visits, both spoke of how much they had changed the encounter with the so-called indigenous people. The Konrad Lorenz student Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt also dealt with the Tasaday full of enthusiasm and wrote the afterword for the German edition of the book “Steinzeitmenschen im Philippinischen Regenwald” in 1977. Eibl-Eibesfeldt published a 16-millimeter silent film about the jungle people nine years after the fraud was revealed.

Critics and supporters of the reports

Oswald Iten was not deterred by celebrities and authorities and thus finally made reasonable objections to the current representations of the group heard internationally. These objections included those of the anthropologist Professor Zeus Salazar of the University of the Philippines in Quezon City near Manila. At the instigation of the minority commissioner Manuel Elizalde, President Marcos had a reserve built around their living space. Nobody was allowed to enter the reserve without permission. Hand-picked people came, including journalists, such as the head of the AP ( Associated Press ) news agency in Manila, John Nance, who memorialized the group with his book "The Gentle Tasaday". Salazar and many of his colleagues only had to critically examine the material of the anthropologists who had researched the Tasaday under the strict eyes of Elizaldes and who came to pleasing results. He discovered methodical inconsistencies. The publication of his initial findings earned him a defamation lawsuit and a difficult trial in which witnesses were intimidated.

Political dimension in the Philippines and the USA

The ethnological question of what the small community is about, a horde, an independent tribe, with its own language, or whether it was rather members of neighboring tribes such as Manobo or T'Boli, who either in 1971 because of Elizalde or already Leaving their families centuries earlier faded into the background. Because of this, human rights organizations no longer dared to defend the rights of the Tasaday. A balanced occupation with them was very probably not in the interests of the minority commissioner and Marcos-loyal Elizalde, since the news of the encounter with the almost naked made him and his authority world-famous. Observers see reasons for possible fraud on the one hand in the narcissistic personality of Elizalde, who died in May 1997. Others see the possible cause more in the solid political goals of this man, who was running for the Senate at the time. It is also difficult to refute the argument that the cordoning off of the area around the Tasaday habitat served to control Marcos and the multi-million dollar entrepreneur Elizalde over the natural resources and the people, especially the young women.

When Elizalde, after the alleged discovery received worldwide attention, spoke in statements of the protection of minorities, this gave the impression that the Ferdinand Marcos regime was a modern constitutional state, which was not the case: in mid-1971 there were international arrests for arbitrary arrests bad press for Marcos, who gradually became a dictator and finally introduced martial law on September 21, 1972. He eliminated the opposition and had tens of thousands of critics arrested. Marcos granted the former colonial rulers the USA extensive privileges, which in turn gave him a free hand in his human rights violations.

A life of its own in the history of the Stone Age tribe

Tasaday in 1997

The story about the supposed Stone Age people survived the Marcos dictatorship and the Cold War, if only because exposure as a fraud would have meant a loss of face for many celebrities and Marcos favorites ("Cronies"). The initial reports on the group had developed a life of their own early on and the Tasaday had already been the subject of international symposia three times, in Quezon City in 1986, in Zagreb in 1988 and in Washington DC in 1989. In July 1991, five years after the fraud debate had started, wrote the journalists Imke Rafael and Susanne Härpfer in the magazine "Cosmopolitan" of the alleged "Stone Age tribe" of the Tasaday, without even mentioning the long-standing doubts and still waiting with photos from 1972. Both enjoyed Professor Zeus Salazar's hospitality as early as August 1989 on the occasion of an information trip by the Federal Association of Youth Press, so they should have known better.

One of the initially fierce critics of the Stone Age tribe theory has been more conciliatory since 2003: The Oxford- trained writer James Hamilton-Paterson , an intimate connoisseur of the Philippines, wrote in an essay that the Tasaday had certainly long lived alone in the group, if they may descend from tribes in the area. They are just a fringe group, of which there are many in the Philippines. Indeed, one should not forget about the fraud debate that the group called Tasaday are marginalized people.

Well-known untruths

The best known falsehoods about the Tasaday are listed below and refuted by facts:

The Tasaday would have become known outside the area as early as the 1950s. The fact is: Well-known ethnologists claim that they were members of neighboring tribes such as Manobo or T'Boli in disguise. If one follows this thesis, the people presented to the international public as Tasaday never should have been "discovered". Even those who considered the Tasaday to be a hitherto isolated “Stone Age tribe” dated the earliest contacts outside the group to the early 1960s (Nance, John. Tasaday. Stone Age People in the Philippine Rainforest. Munich, 1977, p. 19). By backdating the first encounter, defenders of the “stone age tribe” theory try to explain contradictions using the argument of external influence that would have led the Tasaday to eat rice or to make stone tools that were actually unusable.
The Tasaday lived in caves. The fact is: whether the caves in which the journalist John Nance and his followers photographed were actually ever inhabited by humans, and if so, for how long, only an archaeological investigation could clarify. This was never allowed. When the Swiss journalist and PhD anthropologist Oswald Iten saw the caves in March 1986, he found no traces of alleged centuries of use in them (Iten, Oswald in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 12, 1986. "The Tasaday - a Philippine Stone Age swindle").
Without agriculture, the Tasaday would have lived as hunters. The fact is: Botanists have not found enough plants in the area to provide food for the 24 Tasaday presented in 1971 (Headland, 1992: 216f). When Iten stayed with the Tasaday in 1986, he uncovered the smuggling of rice into the area of the alleged hunter tribe.
The Tasaday would have traditionally used stone tools. The fact is: Salazar came to believe that the Tasaday could not cut any rattan with their supposed axes, as had been claimed. To his colleague Robert L. Carneiro, the stone axes seemed extremely badly polished, above all he thought they were too fragile. The stone used is much too coarsely crystalline (Carneiro, Robert L. in: Headland, 1992: 175).
The Tasaday had called Manuel Elizalde, the head of the Philippine minority authority PANAMIN, “the great bringer of happiness for the Tasaday” (Momo Dakel Diwata Tasaday). The fact is: Iten also learned the opposite in this regard. The group told him that Elizalde had asked them to call him that (Iten in: Headland, 1992: 45). Elizalde did not bring luck to a man named Elizir Bon, a relative of some of the alleged Tasaday. Shortly after Bon Elizalde accused of fraud, he was murdered (Salazar in: Headland, 1992: 82).
Oswald Iten would only have been with the Tasaday for two hours before he published his revelations. The fact is: Iten stayed in the area for several days, after all it took a day and a half to walk from the airport to the caves (Iten in: Headland, 1992: 42ff).
The Philippine authority PANAMIN was founded in 1968 to protect the interests of cultural minorities. The fact is: Since 1965, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos ruled, initially democratically elected. He suppressed and persecuted the opposition, violated human rights and had the politician Benigno Aquino murdered on August 21, 1983 . Marcos was not an advocate of minority rights, rather he and his favorite Elizalde instrumentalized the minorities (Siebert, Rüdiger. Dreimal Philippinen. Munich, 1989: 204ff).
There are several contentious issues about the Tasaday among academics. The fact is: The scientific debate can be reduced to one core question: How credible are the statements of George Tanedo, on which the genealogical data of the Philippine anthropology professor Zeus Salazar are based? If they are credible, the entire thesis that the Tasaday are an independent group breaks down. Then it is only marginally of interest whether they were vegetarians up to 1971 or not, whether they only collected or cultivated plants, whether they were constantly cave dwellers or rather huts, or whether they knew metal tools and processed bamboo (Headland, 1992: 222).

literature

Headland, Thomas, N. The Tasaday Controversy: Assessing the Evidence. Washington DC: American Anthropological Association. (1992). ISBN 0-913167-51-7
Headland, Thomas N. "Tasaday hoax controversy". (2003). Retrieved March 18, 2005.
Iten, Oswald in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 12, 1986. "The Tasaday - a Philippine Stone Age swindle".
Hemley, Robin. Invented Eden - The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday. New York, 2003.
Nance, John. Tasaday. Stone age people in the Philippine rainforest. Munich, 1977.
Nance, John E. (circa 2001). "Friends of the Tasaday". Retrieved March 18, 2005.
Nance, John E. The Gentle Tasaday: A Stone Age People in the Philippine Rain Forest. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. (1975). ISBN 0-15-134990-8 .
Siebert, Rudiger . Philippines three times. Munich, 1989: 101ff.
MacLeish, Kenneth. "The Tasadays: Stone Age cavemen of Mindanao". National Geographic 142 (2), 218-249. (Aug 1972).
Launois, John: "Un Viaje al Mundo de los Tasadays, Tribu de la Edad de Piedra". Revista de Geografia Universal (Edicion Mexicana) Vol.1 No. 1 paginas 3-23, Enero 1976.