Wait, so now the Tasaday are real?

[Excalibre]

In (a minor hijack in) this thread, we were discussing the recent extravagant claims about the Pirahã, a tribe of people living in the Amazon with stone-age technology and (reportedly) what could probably be described as the most culturally primitive group ever studied.

John Mace brought up the Tasaday as a very well-known example of an anthropological hoax - a stone-age era tribe living on the Philippine island of Mindanao. During the 1980s, it was recognized that they were a hoax - that is, other local tribespeople had been convinced to fake a stone-age lifestyle in order to fool the scientists of the world. And I took a glance at the Wikipedia page to learn a bit more about the case, and suddenly I learn that apparently, they weren’t a hoax at all!

Is this true? Are the Tasaday real? Or is Wikipedia just fucking with me? What’s known about them - and was there any fakery at all, or were those claims entirely spurious?

[What_Exit]

Maybe this link will be a small amount of help. Found and lost | Books | The Guardian
At least an interesting article.

Jim

[Lumpy]

Short version: they aren’t an ancient primordial people untouched by time, and they aren’t a deliberate hoax either. They’re now thought to be the descendents of people who fled into the jungle about 300 years ago to escape slave raids.

[Excalibre]

Thank you both. So what I gather is that they were legitimately mistaken for a separate (and peculiarly primitive) culture, but they were actually a small group of recent descendents from agriculturists. Their appearance was politically useful, and so a lot was made of them by the Philippine government. (And the notion of these Edenic natives was immensely appealing to a lot of white people, as their apparently pacifistic nature seemed to confirm notions about the Noble Savage.) But it’s not the case that they were entirely invented - just exaggerated.

[John_Mace]

@Lumpy

Short version: they aren’t an ancient primordial people untouched by time, and they aren’t a deliberate hoax either. They’re now thought to be the descendents of people who fled into the jungle about 300 years ago to escape slave raids.

Yes, but the guy who was their main promoter deliberately slanted the data to make it look like they were more “stone-age” than they really were. He may not have know all the details of what they really were, but he knew he was pulling a fast one of some sort. (IIRC.)

[Colibri]

This site may also be of interest.

So, was the Tasaday story a hoax or not? Today anthropologists agree that the widely-hailed story that these people were Stone Age cavemen living in isolation for hundreds of years is patently false. In that sense, it was a hoax. On the other hand, however, the non-hoax element is that there was a small community of people called Tasaday that really exists and who were living as a separate–but not isolated–group of hunters and food gatherers in the rain forest of the southern Philippines. While there are still some uncertainties about just how the Tasaday lived before they were ‘discovered’ in 1971, we may at least conclude today that these 26 people were neither uncontacted Stone-Age cave dwellers nor farmers brought into the forest and paid to imitate a crude lifestyle of archaic prehistoric Man.

The evidence we have [in 1993] suggests that the Tasaday were a group of hunter-gatherers. But rather than being ultra-primitives, they lived during the first half of the twentieth century much like other hunter-gatherer groups in Southeast Asia. They thus had iron tools and did not use stone axes; they wore cotton cloth; and they lived in simple thatch huts, although they may have slept in caves occasionally when on overnight trips, just as do other Asian hunter-gatherers. They certainly ate wild foods, but also cultivated foods such as rice and root crops that they got through trading.

The Tasaday did live separate–but neither alone nor isolated–from Manobo farming groups. They visited and traded with outsiders, and especially with the farmers living in the village just two-and-a-half miles from the Tasaday cave. And they were once farmers themselves, a century ago, descendants of Manobo farmers who separated from an agricultural village sometime in the 19th century, and moved deeper into the rain forest near where they live today.

[LonesomePolecat]

@Lumpy

Short version: they aren’t an ancient primordial people untouched by time, and they aren’t a deliberate hoax either. They’re now thought to be the descendents of people who fled into the jungle about 300 years ago to escape slave raids.

So who was conducting slave raids in the Philipines 300 years ago?

[Colibri]

@LonesomePolecat

So who was conducting slave raids in the Philipines 300 years ago?

The Spanish. The Philippines were a colony of Spain from the late 1500s on.