Word: tasaday
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Dates: during 1971-1971
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...curiosity is aroused. In your article on the Tasaday tribe [Oct. 18] you state that these Stone Age people in the Philippines have no metal technology. Of what material, then, are the earrings that a tribesman is wearing in your accompanying photograph...
...Tasaday say that most of the brass wire used for earrings was given to them by the trapper who visited them. They claim that they inherited some from their ancestors who probably got it from outsiders also...
Epidemic Smallpox. That advice, the Tasaday believe, is based on knowledge that is transmitted by their ancestors. In their dreams, the tribesmen may see the sugoy, their deceased "soul relatives," who live in fine dwellings among the treetops, as well as Salungal, "the owner of the mountains," who tells them where to search for palm pith and game animals...
...Tasaday are a timid people, wary of strangers and so afraid of the fugú, or epidemics like smallpox, that have ravaged the area in the past that they are reported to abandon sick people to die alone and unaided. Their precarious existence permits few to reach old age, and they seem to find little joy in life. Yet the Tasaday like to stand in the rain and let the water course down their bodies. And they enjoy the music of the kúbing, a kind of jew's-harp made from bamboo and carried from place...
...retain the "lost" tribe as a link with man's distant past, the Philippine government may designate the Tasaday forest home-estimated to be twelve square miles-as a preserve that will be off limits to loggers, ranchers, miners and other invaders. But even well-intentioned visitors from the 20th century may undermine any future anthropological studies of the tribe; gifts of a bow and arrow, a metal bolo knife and sugar from Dafal and the investigating scientists are already moving the Tasaday out of the Stone...