John Nance

Inaccurate Beyond Repair

After reading Robin Hemley's "Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday," I ordered John Nance's "Lobo of the Tasaday: A Stone Age Boy Meets the Modern World." The Tasaday certainly do have a "disputed" history with many people claiming they were a hoax created by a self-serving and corrupt Philippine bureaucrat during the Marcos dictatorship. Hemley's conclusion seems reasonable: the Tasaday were a secluded people, though it was a great exaggeration to call them a "Stone Age" or an uncontacted tribe.

Because of the scandal surrounding the Tasaday, it is very difficult to read Nance's work as a piece of non-fiction. If it is non-fiction, it is full of inaccuracies. The group did not dress only in leaves and they did not use only simple stone tools. They did not live exclusively in caves and were not as peaceful as Nance says. Nance interprets the Tasaday like many of the hand-selected anthropologists who were granted access by the corrupt bureaucrat: Nance shows them as innocent yet extremely wise "noble savages." This interpretation played very well to a public that wanted to believe.

The most eye-roll inducing part of the book regards the corrupt bureaucrat, Manuel Elizalde, who later absconded from the country with millions of dollars when the dictatorship fell. Nance implies rather forcefully that Elizalde's arrival was foretold by a Tasaday legend. That this messianic Elizalde served as Nance's patron in the Philippines leaves the reader with a bad taste in their mouth.

As fiction, the book could be interesting, especially for young children. Although I'm not an artist, the photographs seem fine. The photographs seem to match with the text, although they could not tell a story by themselves.

All told, this book cannot be divorced from the controversies surrounding the Tasaday.… (more)