Word: tasaday
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ARTS Tokyo Pop: Takashi Murakami Books: The Tasaday story...
...Tasaday story created an immediate sensation, first as an allegory representing our yearning for a more peaceful, simpler time and then as a symbol of our own gullibility. In 1971, as a terrible war dragged on in Southeast Asia, a Stone Age tribe was discovered living in total seclusion in the Philippine rain forest. The Tasaday were gentle folk whose language lacked even a word for war. They dressed in loincloths and skirts made of orchid leaves, slept in picturesque caves and lived off the land on a diet consisting of fruit, fish and insects. NBC Evening News broke...
...Robin Hemley, in his book Invented Eden, asks if someone did just that. In 1986, a Swiss reporter named Oswald Iten returned to the rain forest and found the Tasaday wearing Levi's jeans and T shirts. They said that they were local farmers who had been coerced previously into playing cavemen. A few weeks later, a team from Der Stern arrived, led by the Tasaday's original discoverer, and found them once again wearing leaves. That, supposedly, proved they were fake. Comparisons were drawn with Piltdown Man, the great paleoanthropological hoax of the early 20th century...
...Tasaday controversy has raged ever since. It will never be resolved, because from the beginning their cave, whether or not it was their actual dwelling, was run as a media attraction by Manuel Elizalde, the Philippine politician who became their patron. And that made it impossible to carry out any sort of legitimate scientific research. Elizalde favored journalists over anthropologists; celebrities such as Charles Lindbergh and Gina Lollobrigida (who was a chum of Imelda Marcos, for whom she wrote the text of a coffee-table book about the Tasaday) choppered in to have a look at the prelapsarian freaks...
...Invented Eden attempts to elucidate the convoluted enigmas surrounding the Tasaday and their relationship with the outside world. No one emerges looking very pretty. Elizalde, who died in 1999, was something of a playboy gangster; the first wave of discoverers come across as naive, all too willing to believe the story Elizalde handed them; the debunkers are most ruthless of all, in Hemley's account, out to discredit personally anyone who believes in the Tasaday. If the original story seemed too good to be true, those who debunked it are portrayed here as unscholarly in their methods or worse. Some...