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Steve, I was in a cultural anthropology course about the time the Tasaday were big news, and remember watching a film about them. Then I saw a television expose some years later, and I couldn't believe that everyone had fallen for this joker's scam, or that the tribe had gone along. But the gullibility that caused all of the furor has been at the heart of anthropology from the beginning--- The desire to find the "noble savage", and demonstrate that civilization has somehow gone against nature, to our detriment. Ruth Benedict, another star whose research has come under a cloud, wanted to give us the "Peaceful Zuni", who are not hung up on gender roles; Margaret Mead wanted to present us with "Post- Freudian Samoans" who were better adjusted because of their freedom of sexual experimentation; and then there were the Tasaday... |
