In 1971 Manual Elizalde, a Philippine government minister with a dubious background, discovered a band of twenty-six “Stone Age” rain-forest dwellers living in total isolation. The tribe was soon featured in American newscasts and graced the cover of
National Geographic. But after a series of aborted anthropological ventures, the Tasaday Reserve established by Ferdinand Marcos was closed to visitors, and the tribe vanished from public view.
Twelve years later, a Swiss reporter hiked into the area and discovered that the Tasaday were actually farmers whom Elizalde had coerced into dressing in leaves and posing with stone tools. The “anthropological find of the century” had become the “ethnographic hoax of the century.” Or maybe not. Robin Hemley tells a story that is more complex than either the hoax proponents or the authenticity advocates might care to admit. It is a gripping and ultimately tragic tale of innocence found, lost, and found again. The author provides an afterword for this Bison Books edition.
Robin Hemley is the author of numerous books, including The Last Studebaker and Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
"An enthralling, impressive work for general readers and specialists alike."—Library Journal
"Besides a terrific story, Invented Eden is a savvy caution."—Harper’s Magazine
"Hemley, a thoughtful novelist and memoirist, painstakingly unravels a dense snarl of romantic notions, political agendas, scientific rivalries, thorny personalities, and rampant misperceptions to disclose a far stranger tale."—Booklist
"What's best about the book is Hemley’s insistence on ambiguity; the truth, he notes, cannot be known because there is no one truth, but many different, overlapping strategies for interpreting the world. . . . By staking out a middle ground between Elizalde and the skeptics, Hemley enlarges Invented Eden, turning it into a book not just about one tribe but about the way we consider tribal culture as a whole."—David Ulin, Chicago Tribune
"It takes an intrepid reporter to bushwhack through the thicket of assertions and counter-assertions surrounding the Tasaday and venture into the physically challenging ‘heart of grayness’ of their reserve. . . . [Invented Eden] is a resonant, cautionary tale that pits society's eagerness for a romantic return to uncorrupted primitivism against a tendency toward cynicism and exploitation."—Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor
"Invented Eden is a timely study of why the press is so often the victim of its own frenzies, but Hemley also uses the Tasaday story to make a larger, less persuasive argument about why so many people were willing to believe what was, essentially, a fairy tale. . . . [Hemley] shows that all the screaming headlines and wild speculations were not only harmful, but they also were unnecessary: It turns out that the best story of all was simply the truth."—Robyn Creswell, Newsday
"Hemley is the rare Westerner who leaves the Tasaday with their enigma—and dignity—intact."—Publishers Weekly
"Robin Hemley's book is a brave and wholly convincing attempt to find the truth concerning the 'anthropological fraud of the century'."—James Hamilton-Paterson, London Review of Books