This story has a few different facets, and let’s see if we can figure them out:
Some forty-odd years ago, there was a “discovery” of a “Stone Age” tribe in The Philippines. What they WERE, in fact, was a group that had been known previously, and they had had contact with the outside world. It was just that they lived far enough in the boondocks that they rarely interacted even with other tribes nearby. The Filipino anthropologist who “discovered” them got their “native territory” declared a sanctuary, and was able to raise money to “study tem in their primitive state.”
Of course, Western and Japanese media played this up big, and all sorts of stories of the “savage innocents” and “noble savage” stripe came out, where we were supposed to think that these people were “unspoilt” by the modern world and were still living as hunter-gatherers, not even possessing agriculture. If all this bears a resemblance to the film Krippendorf’s Tribe, it should– since it was that film’s inspiration.
Well, after the fall of Marcos, it was alleged that the whole thing, like with Krippendorf, was a con. What was interesting is that here were people who were somewhat skeptical in the first place, but thought they knew what the anthropologist was up to, and gave him the benefit of the doubt. What they thought the game was, was that he had run across people who were, in anthropological terms, “secondary primitives”– a society made up of people who, for some reason, had regressed from a higher state of “civilization” back to a hunter-gatherer existence. This they figured, from the fact that the dialect these “primitives” spoke was an archaic version of the dialect of a more-advanced society a few hours away by jungle roads, a society that HAD interacted with the colonial Spaniards from the 16th C. to 1898, and later, the Americans who had ruled The Philippines till 1946.
What the people who THOUGHT they knew what the game was, supposed was that it would be a lot harder to get grants to study “backsliding” third-world societies that may have rejected contact with Westerners. The more-Establishment-type grant-making organizations would be loathe to underwrite something that could turn into “Aren’t these people wise to reject the modern world!”, while the Social Justice people would want it turned into some version of that these people were being oppressed and then took to the forest, and lived “the only way mankind CAN live, communally!” Any which way, much easier just to claim this was some sort of “first contact.”
As it happened, there WERE some people who genuinely HAD returned to the wild maybe two centuries ago (yet had still stayed in sporadic contact with the outside), but there were others who were “hired” to play the primitives “to make it look good.” Those that had returned did so more from hiding from other tribes than from the Spanish or Americans. Those who “play-acted” did so more from the Government and NGO gravy-train they were led to believe was forthcoming.
Now, I suppose, as with my article about the tax-refund cashing business, there’s more than one moral to be derived from this tale– there’s “Don’t do fraudulent ‘Science!’…”, there’s “When Government mazuma enters the picture, you just KNOW some people will glom onto it”, there’s “The people who get conned worst are those who think they know what the con is, but really don’t,” and probably a few more you can think up.
I’m just wondering to what extent our whole political playing field right now resembles “those who ‘escaped’,” “those who are ‘play-acting’,” “Those who are running the con,” “those who are willing to play along with the ‘con’ but are being conned themselves,” and whatever other permutations of the possibilities that there are. And I’m not saying there’s ONE con, either– there’s possibly several, and they aren’t all mutually exclusive, either.
