|
02 September 2003
Revisiting the Tasaday
THOSE were, if I may
borrow from the title of Pete Lacaba's book about that era, days of
disquiet and nights of rage. The year was 1971 and the country was in
ferment, the Ferdinand Marcos presidency battling a legal opposition,
the communist New People's Army and the Muslim separatist Moro National
Liberation Front.
Some time in July that year, the government first announced that a
previously unknown tribe, consisting of 27 men, women and children, had
been found in South Cotabato province. They apparently lived in caves,
wearing only leaves and were totally dependent on nature, living by
hunting and gathering.
For most Filipinos, more concerned with day-to-day issues of survival,
the news of the Tasaday had little impact. Only one newspaper, the
Manila Daily Mirror, carried the Tasaday story and buried it on Page 14:
"Lost Tribe Found in C'Bato." But an American journalist, John
Nance, caught the story and contacted Manda Elizalde, head of Panamin
(Presidential Assistant for National Minorities), asking to visit the
Tasaday. Eventually, word about the Tasaday spread around the world as
American networks featured the tribe.
Elizalde was praised in the world's press and described as a protector
of lost tribes, the Tasaday fondly calling him "Momo Dakel"
(Big Uncle). He brought in a string of other visitors, from Imelda
Marcos to Gina Lollobrigida and Charles Lindbergh, as well as
anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, botanists, and of course,
journalists.
The world, too, was going through days of disquiet, with the Vietnam War
and brutal US-supported dictatorships in every continent. The baby
boomers born after World War II were coming of age, and were
discontented, asking too many questions. This was an era of hippies and
drugs and the sexual revolution. Suddenly, the Tasaday offered a vision
of what humans could have been: gentle (as in the book "The Gentle
Tasaday") and peaceful (their language had no words for war).
The August 1972 issue of National Geographic featured Lobo, a little
Tasaday boy, climbing a vine. The story itself carried a picture of a
Tasaday father and son with this caption: "In naked innocence, a
Tasaday boy toys with a bright bloom plucked from the wilds of a
primeval Eden."
The Tasaday discovery did not go unchallenged. University of the
Philippines professors Zeus Salazar and Jerome Bailen questioned the
research methods used by the scientists brought in by Elizalde.
Underlying these questions were suspicions about the motives of Elizalde
and the Marcos administration. While the foreign press praised Elizalde
for protecting the Tasaday and other minorities, local NGOs
contemptuously referred to Panamin as "Pana-mina," reflecting
suspicions that Elizalde and Marcos were after mineral resources in the
area.
In 1974 the government ordered the Tasaday area closed to visitors,
supposedly to protect the tribe. The Tasaday disappeared from public
view until 1986, after Marcos was ousted, when Swiss journalist Oswald
Iten and Filipino activist reporter Joey Lozano returned to the area.
They produced an article claiming that the Tasaday, now wearing T-shirts
and Levi's, were actually local farmers who had been asked to pretend
they were members of a lost tribe. The German magazine Stern then sent
two reporters to the area, where people had now reverted to wearing
leaves.
Debates erupted in local and international conferences, often involving
angry exchanges between those who had discovered the Tasaday (notably
John Nance) and those who looked at the Tasaday as one big fraud (mainly
professors Salazar and Bailen, whom Elizalde, typical of the rich and
powerful, haled to court with a libel suit).
Again, with time, the Tasaday eventually faded from the public eye but
now we have a book from Robin Hemley, "Invented Eden: The Elusive,
Disputed History of the Tasaday," reviving old debates while
raising important new questions.
Hemley helps readers to untangle the many pieces of a huge puzzle,
following one lead after another like a detective would. Hemley did
extensive research, poring through newspapers, magazines, books and
conference proceedings. Most importantly, he interviewed many of the
protagonists, including politicians, researchers, journalists and the
Tasaday themselves.
Because Hemley's book is so riveting, I don't want to spill the beans on
his ending. I will do another column later this year where I will deal
with his conclusions, but I want to recommend the book because it goes
beyond the issue of whether the Tasaday were a hoax or not. As the title
goes, "Invented Eden" challenges us to think about how our
perceptions and interpretations of "reality" are, even with
all claims of objectivity, affected by personal values, maybe even
subconscious needs.
A photograph of a Tasaday child in the National Geographic article says
it all: "'Nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state,'
wrote French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau two centuries ago. His
theory about the human condition seems borne out by this Tasaday child
and his defenseless kin, who must now depend on the protection of
20th-century man for their very survival as a people."
Perhaps we need to believe Eden was in the Philippines, in the Tasaday
reservation. Alas, Hemley's book reminds us the saga of the Tasaday is
actually another chapter in a less harmonious history of humanity, and
of the Philippines. Hemley has no heroes or villains, instead sketching
out an often-depressing picture of our society, with its dehumanizing
poverty and the poor all too easily transformed into dispensable pawns.
Dispensable, but not necessarily helpless. Hemley's book also sheds new
light on the Tasaday themselves and their reactions to the outside
world. Perhaps they learned to play with Momo Dakel and other potential
benefactors. In other instances, they may have reacted with
exasperation. Hemley writes about how the Tasaday would sometimes lapse
into "nafnaf," a private "language" where all the
words would end with the sound "nuf" indecipherable to the
best of linguists. Hemley's interpretation of "nafnaf" is that
the Tasaday probably switched to "nafnaf" when tired of the
inquisitive outsiders.
More than 30 years after the Tasaday controversy first erupted, we live
again in days of disquiet and nights of rage. Perhaps the Tasaday -- if
we mean those pushed to the margins -- thrive in far greater numbers
than we could ever have imagined. Perhaps we are rapidly becoming
fragmented, becoming a mere conglomeration of lost worlds, lost tribes,
lost souls.
|
