The Myth of the Noble Savage

[MithLuin]

Jny, I don't know about the giraffe hunt, but I do know that only a year (or 2 or 3) ago, Nat'l Geographic had a similar problem - one of their stories included bogus pictures of an...elephant hunt? Yeah, I think that's what it was. Apparently, these people do hunt elephants (at least sometimes), so the idea wasn't totally bogus....but they weren't then, so the photographer just got some tusks from somewhere and posed them near the body of a dead elephant, or something. The magazine missed the error, but some readers noted the catalogue numbers on the ends of the tusks and knew it was a hoax, so the magazine had to print a huge retraction. The retraction ought to be on their website....

Ah, here it is: Letter from the Editor
It was the July 2004 issue.

I don't know all the details behind the filming of The End of the Spear and Beyond the Gates of Splendor. I do know that there was collaboration between the 'real' Waodani from Ecuador and the group in Panama who played them in the movie. It was set up as a ... collaborative effort? Rather than just 'so, we're coming in here to film you.' But, I don't know, the movie is a real movie, with American actors, designed for an American audience. I mean...it's not too difficult to see who was doing the decision making and providing the budget on the project! But I seriously doubt the whole thing was a hoax, even if the portrayal has sensationalized elements. (I mean, I've seen Steve Saint and Mincaye in person). I guess I am saying that it is no worse than most Hollywood versions of 'based on a true story' - and probably better, because some of the people involved in the project were the key players.

[Jnyusa]

Mith, I wasn't thinking at all about the movie you mentioned when I brought the giraffe example. I haven't seen End of the Spear and don't know anything about it. Certainly there are plenty of good documentaries about indigenous peoples. I was just bringing the giraffe example to show that even educational info can be goofy and, in the case of the Tasaday, even professional anthropologists using the 'correct' methods can be deceived. They wanted so badly to find a tribe like that, a missing link to the stone age, you know, that they didn't ask perceptive questions.

vison, the fans of Chardin are still hopping mad over Gould's articles about Piltdown Man. It makes me smile a bit because Gould's explanation is so ... human. One can totally imagine a playing a harmless prank like that, underestimating the mark's eagerness for instant fame, and then being stuck in embarrassed silence forever. Chardin did not make any deathbed confessions, but I too suspect that Gould nailed that one.

Jn

[vison]

Mith, I wasn't thinking at all about the movie you mentioned when I brought the giraffe example. I haven't seen End of the Spear and don't know anything about it. Certainly there are plenty of good documentaries about indigenous peoples. I was just bringing the giraffe example to show that even educational info can be goofy and, in the case of the Tasaday, even professional anthropologists using the 'correct' methods can be deceived. They wanted so badly to find a tribe like that, a missing link to the stone age, you know, that they didn't ask perceptive questions.

vison, the fans of Chardin are still hopping mad over Gould's articles about Piltdown Man. It makes me smile a bit because Gould's explanation is so ... human. One can totally imagine a playing a harmless prank like that, underestimating the mark's eagerness for instant fame, and then being stuck in embarrassed silence forever. Chardin did not make any deathbed confessions, but I too suspect that Gould nailed that one.

Jn

Teilhard de Chardin is one of my bugbears, to be honest. It was a most enjoyable read!

I dislike de Chardin intensely. More than I dislike Thomas Merton.

[MithLuin]

I also dislike what little I know of Teilhard de Chardin. I didn't know he had anything to do with Piltdown Man, though.
Edit: This article challenges Gould's claim.

All I knew was that he had weird ideas about how we were evolving into some sort of mega-consciousness (well, and that he was a French Jesuit paleontologist). The booklet I read needed 'Help, help, I'm being oppressed!' emblazoned on the cover, but admitedly, it was written about him, not by him. It didn't interest me, so I didn't dig any further.

Jny, I know you weren't.

[vison]

I also dislike what little I know of Teilhard de Chardin. I didn't know he had anything to do with Piltdown Man, though.
Edit: This article challenges Gould's claim.

All I knew was that he had weird ideas about how we were evolving into some sort of mega-consciousness (well, and that he was a French Jesuit paleontologist). The booklet I read needed 'Help, help, I'm being oppressed!' emblazoned on the cover, but admitedly, it was written about him, not by him. It didn't interest me, so I didn't dig any further.

Jny, I know you weren't.

I know that Gould's detective work is not universally accepted, but it fits so nicely.

[Faramond]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasaday

Is this wikipedia article accurate?

[Jnyusa]

In the 1980s, claims were made that the Tasaday were a hoax on the grounds that the "Tasaday" were merely members of known local tribes faking a Stone Age lifestyle. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, interviews, scientific research and inquiries by the Philippine government sought to differentiate between the real Tasaday, the hoax claims and the enthusiastic and sometimes overstated reports of the 1970s. Though some past studies had concluded with mixed results, the original hoax claims have been shown bogus and the Tasaday of the 1970s are now recognized as an authentic group surviving with primitive skills for at least seven generations (over 150 years by the 1970s), during which time they developed their own dialect of the Cotabato Manobo language.

This is what I read about it in an anthropology journal about three years ago, refuting continuing claims that the tribe really did exist:

Several of the tribespeople who claimed to be members of the Tasaday were subsequently located and interviewed living in other villages which were their actual homes. They lived 'modern' lives - T-shirts and jeans, radios, some modern equipment - and claimed that they were paid to impersonate a tribe living deep in the jungle.

The hoax was traced to the Minister of the Interior (whose name I've forgotten). He was trying to get the lands on which the Tasaday supposedly lived taken from private domain to public domain and placed under the management of his Ministry so that he could execute timber contracts that he had promised and for which he was going to receive kickbacks. Other government departments or else the private owners (I've forgotten now who all was involved in the dispute, because part of it involved some kind of power play inside the government) were fighting attempts to have these lands placed in the Ministry of Interior, but the government was forced to set the land aside as a reserve under Interior once the Tasaday were 'discovered'.

I have never heard that the hoax turned out to be bogus, but rather that the Ministry of Interior was attempting to maintain the facade that such a tribe existed by rotating in impersonators. Anthropologists who went after the first wave found a population of different individuals, no one knew where the originals had gone, and most of them were never located except for those couple who were found in other villages and claimed it was all a joke.

The government has an interest in maintaining the facade because if the tribe does not exist the lands will be open again to legal dispute and the government might not be able to control the timber.

The anthropologists who had acquired some fame because of the Tasaday wanted very much to disprove the hoax and apparently blitzed the professional journals with articles claiming that the tribe really existed, the members had gone deeper into the forest and were so traumitized by their contact with the white man that they did not want to come forth again, and so on, but these claims have not been accepted by the academic community at large. Those people whom the government claims to be the Tasaday today are viewed by the majority of anthropologists (overwhelming majority by my understanding) as amusement park attractions - people hired to live in the jungle and impersonate a stone aged tribe, but not the real thing.

That is the sum total of my knowledge about the affair.

Jn

[vison]

Same here.

It's sort of interesting, though. In a schadenfreude kinda way. (Not sure I spelled that right, but you know what I mean.)

The Piltdown Man episode is the same but different. It was in a much earlier era, and the search for a "British" primitive man was seen as perfectly OK: he was going to be wearing a primitive derby, maybe made of mammoth hide, and was to be carrying a furled umbrella and would have been run over by a rhino on his way to the station. . .

Well, maybe not quite.

[MithLuin]

This was on CNN today. They report archeolgical evidence of human sacrifice (and cannibalism) during the Spanish conquest. The town where this happened did not usually practice human sacrifice - it was done in retaliation for the death of an Aztec leader at the hands of the Spanish.

I don't know what leads them to say that sometimes, the hearts were eaten raw. But it is kinda hard to argue with teeth marks on the bones .

[Jnyusa]

There was a PBS program about remains found of the Navaho ancestors during the Aztec Conquest that indicate cannabalism. There are, iirc, about 120 remains of people that appear to have been eaten, and then a lot of other remains that they were able to test for the presence of something indicative of cannabilsm, some protein in the cells or something.

But the circumstances are hard to decipher. The bones are in caves on top of a mesa and it looks as if the people were stranded there. DNA indicates two different population groups, and all the eaten are from the same group. So they don't know if this was forced cannabalism or desperation cannablism (seige and starvation) or what.

The modern native Americans are all upset about the discovery because they're afraid it will open a new round of accusations that they were cannabals until the Europeans tamed them. And because the evidence is not definitive there's debate over what it means.

Jn

[axordil]

There's about as much evidence for human sacrifice in prehsitoric and historic Europe as there is for it in Mesoamerica, which is to say, enough to make a strong case for it, but not enough to demonstrate exactly how common it was.

[Faramond]

I don't see how genocide could be a normal tactic in every culture. The human race couldn't possibly sustain every culture being genocidal, could it? Every kill, every instance of combat, requires extra calories to sustain, and a mass killing, a war of annihilation, will take a lot of extra calories. Frankly, a lot of these tribal societies didn't live in places that could produce many excess calories per person anyway, so genocide simply wouldn't be practical.

A year of war is a prominence in human history, while one hundred years of peace is flat. We can see evidence of wars, maybe, but how regular were they? It must be a myth that war in tribal society was unknown before contact with Europeans. But it must also be a myth that tribal societies were in a constant state of war.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[vison]

I think it very much depends upon two things: what the attitude towards war was in any given group, and the state of their technology.

Don't forget that there were many cultures that thought of War as the natural state of man; moreover they thought that was a GOOD thing.

Was it not the Greeks who said, "War is the father of everything"?

[Frelga]

Something I've often wondered - was there ever 100 years of peace?

[axordil]

Worldwide? 100 years of peace? That's a toughie. I'm assuming you mean without a declared war or active campaigning between nation-states, kingdoms or empires, since there's always minor border and internal squabbles somewhere...

[MithLuin]

Well, not in the last 200 years, obviously, nor in the past 500 years, nor in the past 2000 years, nor in the....

No, as far as I know, there has not been 100 years of peace. And not even worldwide. While you can find some states without wars, you'd be hardpressed to find an entire area that has been war-free for any length of time. Not the Mideast in antiquity, nor Europe in recorded history, nor the US since colonial times.... I don't know much about Chinese history, but it doesn't strike me as peaceful....

Switzerland's neutrality is fairly unique, I think. ... and I'm not sure if even they do much better than 100 years. They had wars in 1530, 1656, 1712, 1798, 1847. (That last was a civil war).

The US, of course, has difficulty going 25 years w/o a war. Currently, Iraq, preceded by Desert Storm (10 years ago), preceded by various Cold War activities, preceded by Vietnam (early '70s), preceded by Korea (1950s), preceded by WWII (1940s), preceded by WWI (1919), preceded by the Spanish-American War (1898), preceded by the Civil War (1860-65), preceded by the Mexican-American War (1840s), preceded by the War of 1812, preceded by the War of Independence (1776), preceded by the French-Indian Wars....
I am not going to argue over whether Desert Storm was really a war, or if it was much different than US involvement in say, Kosovo or Somalia. The point is just that you'd be hard-pressed to find a generation of Americans who had not lived through a war (or 2).

The best I can come up with is the Pax Romana. ... but of course there were wars on the borders then.

[axordil]

Which applied to Europe alone.

You might have to go to the beginning of the historical record, where the scarcity of documents makes it harder to determine if war was going on.

[MithLuin]

Orcs against cannibalism (though not against using false charges of same to insight violence ):

'Aye, we must stick together,' growled Uglúk. 'I don't trust you little swine. You've no guts outside your own sties. But for us you'd all have run away. We are the fighting Uruk-hai! We slew the great warrior. We took the prisoners. We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand: the Hand that gives us man's-flesh to eat. We came out of Isengard, and led you here, and we shall lead you back by the way we whoose. I am Uglúk. I have spoken.'

'You have spoken more than enough, Uglúk,' sneered the evil voice. 'I wonder how they would like it in Lugbúrz. They might think that Uglúk's shoulders need relieving of a swollen head. They might ask where his strange ideas came from. Did they come from Saruman, perhaps? Who does he think he is, setting up on his own with his filthy white badges? They might agree with me, with Grishnákh their trusted messenger; and I Grishnákh say this: Saruman is a fool, and a dirty treacherous fool. But the Great Eye is on him.
'Swine is it? How do you fold like being called swine by the muck-rakers of a dirty little wizard? It's orc-flesh they eat, I'll warrant.'

Many loud yells in orc-speech answered him, and the ringing clash of weapons being drawn.

Effective, but an orc-technique if there ever was one.

The Seige of Angband lasted nearly 400 years (the Battle of Sudden Flame was in 455 First Age), with only occasional eruptions of violence.

[Frelga]

I wasn't looking for worldwide peace, but like Mith I couldn't come up with a single geographical region that went without wars for 100 years.