BAGUIO CITY – The
controversial Tasadays lost their identity as a group because of
fallacious media projection and faulty research.
Manuel “Manda”
Elizalde with a “Tasaday” native during the 1970s.
Photo copyright by John Nance |
This was the
observation made by two anthropology professors from the University of the
Philippines (UP) in Diliman, Quezon City in a recent forum at UP Baguio.
The forum, “What’s New about the Tasaday? Implications for Practice in
(Public Interest) Anthropology,” was sponsored by the Department of Social
Anthropology and Psychology, UP Baguio College of Social Sciences and the
Ugnayang Pang-Agham Tao, Inc.) (UGAT, Inc. or anthropology network,
incorporated).
In the forum, UP
Diliman professors Ponciano Binnagen and Israel Cabanilla, anthropologists
and indigenous people’s rights advocates spoke of their 2003 visit to the
controversial Tasaday cave to search for the truth of the Tasaday
existence. The existence of the Tasadays has been the subject of heated
debate for over 30 years.
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The “noble savage”
in the Space Age
In 1971, during the
presidency of Ferdinand Marcos, Manuel “Manda” Elizalde -- scion of a
wealthy clan -- claimed to have discovered a group of “Stone Age” people
dwelling in a cave near Mt. Tasaday, South Cotabato, Mindanao.
Elizalde virtually made a career out of exposing the “Paleolithic” ways of
these people, untouched by “civilization” from the modernizing outside
world.
Journalists from
noted international publications like the National Geographic,
Search, Science News and Asiaweek, Charles Lindbergh and
actress Gina Lollobrigida, among others, intrigued and eager to witness
the existence of the Tasadays, visited the cave site one after the
other. However, in 1973, the area was sealed off to all intruders.
Elizalde left the country 13 years
later, after the ouster of the Marcos dictatorship. He died in 1997.
Other journalists
would since then see the Tasadays wearing modern clothes. This generated
heated debate in academic and media circles, with some dismissing the
Tasadays as a hoax and Elizalde as a fraud.
The Tasaday fraud
made it to the London-based Guardian’s 10 great hoaxes of the century.
The UP Department of
Anthropology and UGAT, Inc. stepped into the debate by organizing an
international conference on the Tasaday case in August 1986.
Tasadays: then and
now
In the next several
years after that, every mention of the Tasadays would give rise to the
question of whether or not they really exist.
Further studies
proved the existence of the real Tasaday. In a review of Robin
Hemley’s Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday
(2003), writer James Paterson stated: “They are not a (Stone Age) tribe,
but a remnant of a much larger group which at some point during the past
centuries (not millennia) fled deeper into the forest to escape a measles
epidemic that is still part of their folklore. In this way they became
isolated long enough for their language to have acquired mutations and for
them to have forgotten their farming habits and reverted to
hunting-gathering.”
Binnagen and
Cabanilla, together with National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP)
representatives, visited the Tasaday Cave in April 2003. On their way to
the exact cave site, they encountered wet rice fields and Binnagen saw
Manobo peasants. He asked if he could take pictures of them and just then,
he learned that the farmers were actually Tasaday-Manobos -- a first
encounter, for him, with the real Tasadays.
Upon entry into the
cave site, Cabanilla immediately observed that the previous depiction of
Tasaday cave-dwelling was completely a hoax. “There should be proofs of
death -- skeletons of their ancestors; stone or metal tools they could
have used and buried in the cave; and just by a single look, the cave
could never allow survival for as short as one year,” he explained.
As he conducted
preliminary exploration of the cave, which was never done before, he
explained that it could only have been frequented but never inhabited for
long. Food, water, sunlight, shelter and “the view” are some of the
survival needs, he said.
The Tasaday cave has
only a foot-high riverside that could never allow enough water animals for
their food. It allows sunlight to get through for only eight hours at
most. The cave’s mouth also provides little view of the surroundings,
making it impossible for the dwellers to observe enemies or at least see
the other caves. Lastly, the cave is too dusty -- cement-like dust falls
from the cave ceiling -- to offer permanent living.
Binnagen and
Cabanilla learned that the Tasaday people, who proudly call themselves as
the Tasaday-Manobo-Blit group (some Tasadays married Manobos and Blits),
are now struggling for self-determination and ancestral domain (29,247
has. of forest reserve that Marcos had set aside for them in Proclamation
No. 995.)
“Despite the
controversy they (Tasaday) faced, I think they are actually the victims,
and the Tasaday are entitled to claim their rights to their own land and
of course, real identity as indigenous peoples of Mindanao,” Binnagen
asserted.
The logos-ethos
from the Tasaday “hoax”
The controversy
affected the Tasadays’ trust in people coming from the “outside. Binnagen
said that some of the Tasadays were anxious that another team might come
and “exploit” them by selling pictures of their “savage” ways of living.
Cabanilla and Binnagen both assured the Tasaday people of the authenticity
of their research – to help them claim their domain and identity.
Members of UGAT, Inc.
emphasize the importance of practicing ethics in performing studies,
research and enthnography on communities. Future anthropologists and
archaeologists must ensure that a free prior and informed consent is
issued to them before any conduct of study to avoid offending the
community to be studied, they say.
“We actually require
our members (UGAT, Inc.) and students to provide translation in the
language of the community studied so the people themselves understand what
their history, ethnicity and identity are about. It’s the least way a
researcher can repay the people,” Binnagen said. Northern Dispatch /
Posted with other reports by Bulatlat
(Bulatlat
Editor’s Note: A former staff member of Elizalde who is now living in the
United States, has confessed that the Tasaday “stone age” site was
actually a monumental hoax.)
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