September 7, 2009

There's a thin line between truth and reality...The Fourth Wall

On Sunday Bank Holiday, I went to Barbican for the last day of that somewhat different exhibition, featuring the (mini) scandal of the Tasaday. For the record, the Tasaday, an ethnic group living in the jungle of the Philippines, were discovered by anthropologists and brought to the media scene in 1971. Reporters spent months with them, including American journalist John Nance. And then the whole region was closed by the PANAMIN, a Philippine organisation taking care of the interests of ethnic minorities, which claimed that it was harmful for this tribe to be approached by foreigners (and those from the Western world in particular).

The Tasaday were brought back to our attention in 1986 when another group of anthropologists and journalists claimed that the previous story was a hoax, and that these people who were allegedly living in isolation since the Stone-Age, who had stone weapons, wore leaves and ate fruits and yams, were in fact members of the nearest village who had been brought there by Elizalde, the Philippine politician behind PANAMIN. The guy had told them to exchange their clothes for leaves and start eating the forest products.

The exhibition used this fact to show footage of the 70's films, as well as interviews from John Nance, in particular. The aim was to work around reality and fiction, and their respective treatment by media. The Fourth Wall being that imaginary line that actors set between themselves and the spectators to immerse even more in the play.

This subject is fascinating, and raises a number of questions.

Firstly, can we set a preserve area around a tribe and therefore put it in prison, just to protect it from the contacts with more 'evolved' societies? Should we do this, as one anthropologist interviewed for the exhib stated?

What is 'evolution', is there a scale from 1 to 10, which says that Western culture in its contemporary form is the utmost degree of evolution towards which all should converge?

What are media seeking, apart from profit and coverage? Are they just interested in scoops, at any price?

And about media, what lies beneath the thin line between truth and reality? It's still unclear whether this whole thing was a hoax or not, despite some troubling facts that have fuelled the controversy over the years – and if we look at the 'suspects', what's their mobile? Did Elizalde really want to protect this tribe from external threats? Was the closure of the region not guided simply by the political embargo on The Philippines? Perhaps the alleged hoax discovery was motivated by the reject of the Philippine regime (as it happened right after President Marcos was deposed, in 1986)? Questions, questions, to which we may never have the correct answer...but for sure, it shows once again that facts and beliefs can be treacherous, so much as to fool scientists and renowned journalists, and that what you read in the press may be true...or may not.

Photograph © John Nance