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The Country and its People / People / Other Cultural Minorities / Tasaday

Number: 28

Region: in the province of South Cotabato province, near the town of Suralla

Dialect: Their language is composed of an 800 word vocabulary. It is similar to the language of the Manobos, the tribe living next to their area of settlement.

Integration: The 28 Tasadays are the most primitive of all the cultural minority groups in the Philippines. When this tribe was discovered in 1972, it was the Tasadays first contact with other humans.

Community: They have no formal leader, and decisions are made by consensus.

Traditional Form of Settlement: At the time they were discovered, they lived in caves located on a rugged mountain about 4,000 ft (1,220 m) above sea level.

Mode of Dress: Both men and women have no clothing but simply a long thin orchid leaf drawn lightly under the crotch and tied at both ends to a rattan waist string.

Cultural characteristics: The Tasadays are known to be gentle people living in a uniquely peaceful way.

After the fall of dictator Marcos, a number of journalists and anthropologists claimed that the whole Tasaday discovery was a hoax. These claims were made only in 1986 and later because for some 12 years before Marcos' ouster access to the Tasaday was cut off, allegedly to preserve for them their original way of life. Shortly after their discovery or alleged discovery, they had become the center of journalistic and anthropological attraction, leading to their rapid assimilation. After Marcos' ouster, to claim that they were a hoax not only gave expression to doubts uttered before but also was well suited to the general climate of criticizing practically everything associated with Marcos or his times.

The first to claim internationally that the Tasaday discovery was a hoax was Swiss journalist Oswald Iten who briefly visited the Tasadays in March 1986 and later claimed in Zurich's Neue Zurcher Zeitung that the Tasadays were not real. He described that the Tasadays were wearing clothing. In fact, the alleged Tasadays were, according to Iten, really members of other tribes forced by Elizalde to wear leaves and sit in caves for photographers as part of a stunt to win him fame, power, and land for mineral prospecting. Soon after, a reporter-photographer team from the German magazine Stern found the Tasaday at their caves looking much as they had in the early 1970s but wearing cloth beneath their leaves. Suddenly a gang of gunmen appeared and took the two journalists prisoner, marching them for days and holding them terrified hostages until a ransom was paid. The team subsequently reported that the Tasaday story was 'a fairy tale' and a 'swindle.'

However, most recently the authenticity of the Tasadays has been internationally confirmed. For example, "the authenticity of the Tasaday tribe of Mindanao was upheld in a symposium held by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. Thursday. In a paper keynoting the special AAA forum, the symposium's chairman, Dr. Thomas Headland, declared: 'I have no doubt that the Tasaday exist, and that they live and have always lived in South Cotabato.'... Three linguists, Garol Mullony of Stanford University, Lawrence Reid of the University of Hawaii and Richard Elkins of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, presented strong linguistic evidence showing that the Tasaday existed as a separate ethnic group... Earlier, two linguists from the University of Malaya Language Center, Dr. Cesar Hidalgo, read before linguists gathered at the University of Chicago a paper entitled: 'The Tasadays, Distinct and Isolated: The Linguistic Evidence,' in which they concluded that the Tasaday language hand been distinct and separate from those of other Manobo groups for thousands of years." (Manila Standard, November 18,1989)"

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