Obit: John Edwards Nance

[Harald Hammarström]

Dear Loren,
Most of the claims of the newspaper are discussed at length in various
essays in:

Thomas N. Headland (ed.) 1992 The Tasaday controversy: Assessing the
evidence. Washington, DC: The American Anthropological Association

which also references all the earlier literature. The only later additions
to the debate I am aware of
are the papers by Lawrence Reid, of which the latest (referencing the
others) is:

Lawrence A. Reid 1997 Linguistic Archaeology: Tracking Down the Tasaday
Language,
In: Archaeology and Language, I, pp, 184-208 ed by Roger M. Blench and
Matthew Spriggs,
Routledge.

Since Lawrence is on the list I hope he will correct me if there are further
later things.

As far as I can tell (another non-specialist), the best explanation for the
linguistic and other data is that
the Tasaday were indeed a relatively isolated group who did no agriculture
of their own after splitting off from Cotabato Manobo less than a thousand
years ago. It may well be true that the stone-age image was sexed-up, i.e.,
they were told to get rid of modern influences from the sporadic 1960s
meetings, for the initial studies in 1972, but this does not invalidate the
basic explanation as above.

all the best,

H


On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Loren Billings <sgnillib at gmail.com> wrote:

> The following obituary appeared recently in the Oregonian newspaper
> (by way of my mom). I would welcome comments on the accuracy of claims
> listed below. My sense, as a nonspecialist, is that some of the
> accounts are a little twisted.
>
> --
>
> Loren A. Billings, Ph.D.
> Associate professor of linguistics
> Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
> National Chi Nan University
> Puli, Nantou County 545 Taiwan
>
>
> BEGIN EXCERPT
>
> John Edwards Nance  Dec 19, 195 - March 09, 2010
>   John Edwards Nance, writer and photographer, who chronicled the
> Tasaday tribe of the Philippies, died Tuesday, Mach 9, 2010, at his
> home in Columbus, Ohio. He was 74.
>   Nance spent 40 years photographing and writing about the Tasaday, a
> group of cave-dwelling people discovered living in the Philippine
> rainforest in 1971. He authored 3 books and took tens of thousands of
> photographs of the tribe.  He also established Friends of the Tasaday,
> a foundation that helped preserve their rainforest home, provided them
> with education and health care, and taught them sustainable
> agriculture.
>   A graduate of the U of Oregon...Nance left Oregon in the late 1950s
> to travel the world... landed a job with the Associated press...in
> 1968 he was assigned to Manila as AP bureau chief. It was there that
> he covered a story about aviator, Charles Lindbergh on an expedition
> to meet a group of 26 people discovered by a trapper living in
> isolation in the rainforest.  John's articles and his subsequent book,
> "The Gentle Tasaday," published in 1975, helped catapult the group to
> worldwide attention.  The peacable Tasaday, whose unique language did
> not include words for enemy or war, were studied in the caves by
> dozens of social scientists, who determined that they lived a
> stone-age like existence, subsisting on roots and tadpoles.
>  Nance eventually left the AP, moved back to Oregon, and authored 2
> more books, "The Mud-Pie Dilemma," and a history of the Philippines.
> ...
>   In the late 1980's, the Tasaday fell victim to political intrigue,
> when interests eager to claim their rainforest for mining and logging
> exploitation engineered an elaborate scheme to declare them a hoax.
> Despite the fact that the Aquino government conducted an official
> inquiry and eventually declared the tribe authentic, worldwide media
> and scientists using second-hand studies pronounced them fake.
> Linguists eventually proved their authenticity. Nance spent the next
> 25 years working on behalf of the Tasaday...
>
> END EXCERPT
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>
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