The Gentle Tasaday Are Merely a Persistent Hoax
Published: January 9, 1988, The New York Times
The 1970 ''discovery'' of the Tasaday as a ''Stone Age'' tribe was widely heralded in newspapers, shown on national television in a National Geographic Society program and an NBC special documentary, and further publicized in ''The Gentle Tasaday: A Stone Age People in the American journalist, John Nance.
In all, Manuel Elizalde Jr., the son of a rich Filipino family, was depicted as the savior of the Tasaday through his creation of Panamin (from presidential assistant for national minorities), a cabinet-level office to protect the Tasaday and other ''minorities'' from corrosive modern influences and from environmentally destructive logging companies.
It appears that Manuel Elizalde hoodwinked almost everybody by paying neighboring T'boli people to take off their clothes and pose as a ''Stone Age'' tribe living in a cave. Mr. Elizalde then used the avalanche of international interest and concern for his Tasaday creation to create the Panimin organization for control over ''tribal minority'' lands and resources and ultimately deals with logging and mining companies.
Contrary to your report, the Tasaday did not live ''quietly for nearly 15 years until the departure of the former President, Ferdinand E. Marcos'' in their ''vast protected zone.'' They lived in T'boli communities because they are T'boli, a non-Filipino indigenous people. From the beginning, Mr. Elizalde and Panamin exploited the T'boli (and other indigenous peoples), allowed the logging of T'boli territory and used armed men to keep outsiders away. It was Mr. Elizalde who lived quietly, not the fictitious Tasaday, certainly not the besieged T'boli. In 1983, Mr. Elizalde plundered $35 million from Panimin and fled to Costa Rica with many young indigenous women.
With Mr. Elizalde and his protective henchmen gone, the Tasaday story began to unravel. In August 1986, a Filipino anthropologist, Jerome Bailen, organized a conference on the simmering Tasaday controversy at the University of the Philippines. Several T'boli testified there that they had been paid by Mr. Elizalde to pose as Tasaday.
Mr. Elizalde returned to the Philippines this year, apparently jockeying for ways to raise money and to gain political influence and power. He fell back on his creation, the Tasaday, but instead of promoting them as a fragile Stone Age wonder requiring urgent expensive protection, which only he could provide because of their distrust of anyone else, he teamed up with an evangelical preacher from Manila, Roger Arienda. This time the fund-raising pitch is to the Christian community, and Mr. Arienda has used his television ministry to depict Mr. Elizalde as being the only god the Tasaday knew until he converted them to Christianity.
Mr. Elizalde has other strong friends in high places who are trying to control the Tasaday inquiry in the Philippine House of Representatives led by Representative William Claver, the only indigenous member of congress in the Aquino Government. Of the three T'boli witnesses whose testimony corroborated the hoax, Joel and Blessen Bon are being kept under house arrest by Representative Gualberto Lumauig, an Elizalde partisan, and their brother, Elizer Bon, has been murdered.
Representative Lumauig has been successful in narrowing the inquiry solely to whether or not T'boli were made to pose as Tasaday, thus bypassing the much more damaging charge that T'boli land rights have been ignored and their lands logged by Elizalde cronies.
So if the Tasaday aren't the Tasaday, they might be T'boli; and if they were so, it would be a hoax; but as they are now Christians, it ain't. That's logic. DAVID HYNDMAN BERNARD NIETSCHMANN Berkeley, Calif., Dec. 19, 1987 The writers are, respectively, lecturers in anthropology at the University of Queensland and professor of geography at the University of California.
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May 13, 1986
THE TASADAY REVISITED: A HOAX OR SOCIAL CHANGE AT WORK?
By SETH MYDANS, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
After more than a decade, scientists and reporters have returned to visit a remote Stone Age tribe called the Tasaday, and found that its earlier contacts with the outside world have set it on what appears to be an irreversible road to change.
The new visits have also reopened a debate on the authenticity of the Tasaday, who have now been found to possess bits of clothing, knives, bows and arrows, a mirror and domesticated dogs.
In interviews, two anthropologists who recently revisited the tribe said these new possessions, which had aroused the scepticism of Swiss and German reporters who saw them recently, were an expectable product of the tribe's first contacts with outsiders in the early 1970's. Discovered in 1971
The scientists said they now feared that, if new protective measures were not taken, an influx of researchers, journalists and tourists would destroy their fragile way of life, already imperiled by the approach of loggers, slash-and-burn farmers and the armed insurgencies that share the forests of the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.
The Tasaday, a group of fewer than 30 people, were discovered in 1971 and drew international attention as a cave-using tribe of hunter-gatherers who dressed in orchid leaves and bark, knew no enemies and had no words for war, for ocean or for other peoples.
When two groups of journalists trekked into the jungle recently, they found the tribe members wearing bits and pieces of clothing and displaying other signs of outside influence, and the visitors raised cries of ''hoax'' and ''fairy tale.''
The two anthropologists who visited soon afterward, however, in the company of John Nance, author of a book on the tribe, and a television crew, said the changes were not surprising, and indeed enhanced the scientific interest of the group. 'Textbook Case of Change'
''We're seeing a textbook case of social change, compressed in time,'' said one of the anthropologists, Jesus Peralta, who is curator of anthropology for the National Museum of the Philippines.
The other anthropologist who visited, Carlos Fernandez, said, ''Before we first met them, they were purely forest gatherers.'' ''Then they learned to use a blade, to set traps and now they are learning to hunt,'' he went on. ''Before long they will try their hand at planting.
Mr. Nance, the author of ''The Gentle Tasaday,'' who traveled last month to Mindanao with the two anthropologists, said the Tasaday's preference for T-shirts and other articles of clothing was only natural. ''If leaves were better, we'd all be wearing leaves,'' he said. Brides From Another Tribe
The scientists said the question of a hoax had always been present and remained a possibility. But they said such details as the stone tools and the language used by the Tasaday would be extremely difficult to fabricate. ''Unless another anthropologist produces conflicting data, then the literature stands,'' said Mr. Peralta.
Many of the changes were thought to be the result of two outside influences: a tribal hunter named Dafal, and the marrying of women from a nearby tribe called the Blit.
A small group of primarily male cousins, the Tasaday's main request of the scientists who discovered them was for brides. Mr. Peralta said that, in the years since then, 15 Blit women and two men had married into the tribe.
Dafal and the Blit spouses brought with them clothing, beads, knives, rice and cigars, the scientists said.
''They were already in transition when we first met them,'' Mr. Nance said, referring to their earlier contacts with Dafal. ''Scientists worked to reconstruct what their life had been like before that, and people took the reconstruction as the current reality.''
He said this had led to misconceptions and to the recent accusations of a hoax. When the scientists returned last month, the Tasaday were wearing leaves over what appeared to be bits of clothing.
''We told them that was unnecessary,'' Mr. Peralta said, ''and the next day they came out in assorted kinds of ragged clothing. The Blit women were more or less fully dressed in blouse, skirt, beads and bangles. The children were in leaves. So it was a motley crew.'' The scientists left gifts of clothing behind them, Mr. Peralta said, ''and now a pair of Fernandez's sandals is walking around in there, along with my hat.''
The scientists and a number of the Tasaday recognized each other, but the reunion seemed to have involved little emotion, the scientists said.
''They were happy to see us, of course,'' Mr. Fernandez said, ''but there were some hard questions: What happened to you? Why haven't you visited for so long? What do you want this time?''
The Tasaday were particularly concerned at the disappearance of Manuel Elizalde Jr., the Government's minister in charge of tribal minorities, whom the Tasaday had come to call ''Momo Dakel,'' or ''the great uncle.''
Mr. Elizalde disappeared from the Philippines under mysterious circumstances in 1983, and family members say they have not heard from him since. His role in promoting the discovery of the tribe, followed by his disappearance, has fueled the discussion of fraud. The scientists appeared perplexed by Mr. Elizalde's role, and they said they thought it was possible he stage-managed the actual presentation of the tribe. He may have urged them, for example, to wear only leaves and to present themselves as living permanently in the cave, served as their gathering place.
But they said he did not have the scientific background to have fabricated the data they had gathered on the tribe.
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