Tasaday

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An image released by the media, circa 1970. Photograph by John Nance.

The Tasaday (IPA [təˈsɑdaɪ]) were purportedly a group of uncontacted people living deep in the rainforest on the Philippine island of Mindanao. When the media reported they had been living in isolation since the Stone Age, the group gained international fame in the 1970s. The Tasaday received worldwide press and the attention of anthropologists and scholars throughout the 1970s, and then again in the 1980s, when Oswald Iten claimed they were a hoax masterminded by Manuel Elizalde, Jr. ^[1]

1 Manuel Elizalde
2 Oswald Iten
3 Controversy
4 References
5 External Links

[edit] Manuel Elizalde

Manuel Elizalde was the head of PANAMIN, the Philippine government agency created in 1968 to protect the interests of cultural minorities. He was the son of a wealthy father of Spanish lineage and an American mother. Some found it unusual that a notorious playboy would have interest in a group of primitive people. He took credit for discovering the Tasaday, which he did on June 7, shortly after a local barefoot Blit hunter told him of a sporadic contact over the years with a handful of primitive forest dwellers. He released this to the media a month later, and many people took the long journey of clearing the thickest forest in the world. Weeks later, they were only three hours away when their way was blocked by the PANAMIN guards who only answered to Elizalde. Elizalde only let a handful of the most important people meet them.

[edit] Introduction of the Tasaday

Manuel Elizalde, Jr. brought the Tasaday to the attention of PANAMIN. With a small group including Elizalde's bodyguard, helicopter pilot, a doctor, a 19-year-old Yale student named Edith Terry, and local tribes people for translation attempts, Elizalde met the Tasaday in an arranged clearing at the edge of the forest in June 1971.

In March 1972, another meeting occurred between the Tasaday, Elizalde and members of the press and media including the Associated Press and the National Geographic Society, this time at the Tasaday's secluded cave home site. This meeting was popularly reported in the August 1972 issue of National Geographic by Kenneth MacLeish, which featured on its cover a photograph of a Tasaday boy climbing vines.

Since these first meetings and reports, the group was subject to a great deal of further publicity, including a National Geographic documentary, "The Last Tribes of Mindanao" (shown December 1, 1972). The Tasaday became so popular as to attract such famed visitors as Charles A. Lindbergh and Gina Lollobrigida.

[edit] Ban on visitation

In April 1972, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos (at the behest of PANAMIN and Lindbergh) declared 45,000 acres (182 km²) of land surrounding the Tasaday's ancestral caves as the Tasaday/Manobo Blit Preserve. By this time, eleven anthropologists had studied the Tasaday in the field, but none for more than six weeks, and in 1976, Marcos closed the preserve to all visitors.

One of the reasons for the closing was that a number of suspicions arose. Apparently, their dead were left in the forest under a layer of leaves, but there were no bones, compost, or anything like that. Secondly, although the Tasaday had claimed to be living in the jungle at their cave shelter full time, there was no garbage or sign of human waste. Elizalde claimed that among the 24 remaining Tasaday, there was no wife-sharing, adultery, or divorce. Their diet was claimed to be all forage—wild fruit, palm pith, forest yams, tadpoles, grubs and roots. The calories in this diet are less than the amount needed for survival, so they should have been paper thin. The apparent yams that they survive on were having a shortage around the area they lived. When dietitians and health advisors suggested further research, they were promptly banned from the Tasaday's home. An anthropologist saw soldiers slipping cooked rice to the Tasaday, and he was banned as well.

Prior to the closing of the preserve to visitors, PANAMIN funded essentially all efforts to find, visit, study and protect the Tasaday, with most of the money coming from Elizalde and his family, a lesser portion provided by the Philippine government. As contact between the Tasaday and the world outside their forest virtually ceased with the banning of visitors to the preserve in 1976, so did expenditures on the Tasaday by PANAMIN.

[edit] Elizalde's flight and return

In 1983, some time after the assassination of Philippine opposition political leader Benigno Aquino, Jr., Elizalde fled the Philippines. It had been rumored Elizalde left with and eventually squandered millions of dollars from a foundation set up to protect the Tasaday.

Elizalde returned to the Philippines in 1987 and stayed until his death on May 3, 1997, of bone marrow cancer. While back in the Philippines, from 1987 to 1990, Elizalde said he spent more than one million U.S. dollars defending the Tasaday against hoax claims. During this time, Elizalde also founded the Tasaday Community Care Foundation, or TCCF.

[edit] Oswald Iten

After President Marcos was deposed in 1986, Swiss anthropologist and journalist Oswald Iten, accompanied by Joey Lozano (a journalist from South Cotabato) and Datu Galang Tikaw (a member of the T'boli tribe to serve as chief translator, though he did not speak Tasaday), made an unauthorized investigation to the Tasaday caves where they spent about two hours with six Tasaday.

Upon returning from the forest, Iten and Lozano reported the caves deserted and further claimed the Tasaday were simply members of known local tribes who put on the appearance of living a Stone Age lifestyle under pressure from Elizalde.^[2] Four months later, for ABC television's 20/20 program "The Tribe that Never Was", two young Tasaday men (Lobo and Adug) told the 20/20 interviewer (through Galang, hired by 20/20) they indeed were not Tasaday. These claims of a hoax thrust the Tasaday into worldwide headlines again.

[edit] Controversy

Two years after "The Tribe That Never Was", during the making of a BBC documentary, the same two Tasaday (Lobo and Adug) watched the 20/20 program with a group of other Tasaday and confessed to the gathering that they had lied to the interviewers because, "Galang said if we would say what he told us we could have cigarettes, clothing, anything we wanted." ^[3] On future video and radio programs, Galang confirmed the Tasadays' statement. Nonetheless, the controversy had already incited studies among scholars, politicians and businessmen alike.