Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday [Hardcover]

Robin Hemley (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374177163 | ISBN-13: 978-0374177164 | Publication Date: May 21, 2003 | Edition: 1st

The riveting story of a modern Piltdown hoax—which may not have been a hoax at all

In 1971, a band of twenty-six “Stone Age” rain-forest dwellers was discovered living in total isolation by Manuel Elizalde, a Philippine government minister with a dubious background. The tribe was soon featured in nightly American newscasts and graced the cover of National Geographic. They were visited by such celebrities as Charles Lindbergh and Gina Lollobrigida. But after a series of aborted anthropological forays, the 45,000-acre Tasaday Reserve established by Ferdinand Marcos was closed to all visitors, and the tribe vanished from public view.

Fast-forward twelve years. A Swiss reporter hikes into the area and discovers that the Tasaday were actually farmers who had been coerced by Elizalde into dressing in leaves and posing in caves with stone tools. Soon the “anthropological find of the century” has become the “ethnographic hoax of the century.”

Or maybe not. Robin Hemley tells a story that is more complex than either the hoax proponents or the Tasaday advocates might care to admit. At the center of it is a group of very poor people who have been buffeted by forces beyond their control. Were the Tasaday the creation of gullible journalists, bumbling scientists, and an ego-driven madman, or were they the innocent victims of cynical academics and politicos? In answering that question, Hemley has written a gripping and ultimately tragic tale of innocence found, lost, and found again.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1971, a tiny band of appealingly primitive people was discovered in the Philippines. Profiled on the NBC Evening News, the Tasaday, as they were called, were soon touted as the most significant anthropological discovery of the century, appealing to Westerners curious about the ancient past, and who also fretted about the impact modernity might have on such long-isolated peoples. But in the mid-1980s, Swiss reporter Oswald Iten revealed the group as a hoax. Fascinated by the controversy, Hemley (The Last Studebaker) looks to rescue the Tasaday from the verdicts of what he views as a hyperbolic Western media. From the outset, the Tasaday were tainted by their association with their megalomaniacal protector, Manuel Manda Elizalde, who combined genuine concern for the group with a naked desire to profit through them. Unsurprisingly, the band's reception was inextricably linked with the fortunes of the Marcos and Aquino regimes, and revolutionary guerrilla movements in the region made contact with the Tasaday dangerous. What's clear is that the Tasaday were exploited by enthusiasts and skeptics alike fodder for romantic noble savage ideals as well as for cynicism. Arguments surrounding the Tasaday hinge on questions of language, location and genealogy, and Hemley's noncommittal approach essentially that the Tasaday fell somewhere between genuine article and hoax isn't the best conduit for clarity. What remains clear is that isolation of this sort is a construct; as Henley writes, to our great dismay, no one is as isolated as we once thought. Indeed, stripped of Western rhetoric, the Tasadays' real identity proves elusive. To his credit, Hemley is the rare Westerner who leaves the Tasaday with their enigma and dignity intact. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American

"Elusive" and "disputed" are certainly the words to describe the history of the Tasaday, a group of about two dozen people discovered in 1971 living in an apparently primitive way in a remote Philippine jungle. The "lost tribe" was for a while an international sensation. In 1986, however, a Swiss reporter wrote that several Tasaday had told him that they had been coerced into pretending to be cavemen and were in fact farmers from a neighboring tribe. Hemley, professor of English at the University of Utah, has dug deeply into the Tasaday story. His conclusion: "The Tasaday were pseudo-archaics in Claude Lévi-Strauss's terminology, a small group that had fled into the forest to escape an epidemic of some sort. By 1986 they had become what anthropologist Richard Fox calls professional primitives."

Editors of Scientific American

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (May 21, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374177163
• ISBN-13: 978-0374177164
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,479,907 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Read!, July 15, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday (Hardcover)

This is really a great book! It's informative, but the information is rendered in an unpretentious and accessible style. Regarding the Tasaday controversy, Hemley is fairminded and never preachy. I learned more about the complexities of interactions between the third world and the developed world, and between native peoples and non-native peoples, than anything else I've read.

This book is a must for anyone interested in the fate of native peoples and their habitats. It's also very informative about the cynicism of American network news.

A great book!