I do not know whether to laugh or be outraged when Jean Baudrillard (1984), in his notorious essay “The Precession of Simulacra,” uses a group of aboriginal Filipinos known as “Tasaday” (which the Marcos dictatorship fabricated for its commercial and publicity needs) for his virtuoso ruminations. When the Marcos regime supposedly returned the Tasadays to “their primitive state,” this withdrawal (according to Baudrillard) afforded ethnology “a simulated sacrifice of its object in order to save its reality principle.” The French shaman performs his own magical number here in updating the myth of the “noble savage”: “The Indian thereby driven back into the ghetto, into the glass coffin of virgin forest, becomes the simulation model for all conceivable Indians before ethnology….Thus ethnology, now freed from its object, will no longer be circumscribed as an objective science but is applied to all living thigs and becomes invisible, like an omnipresent fourth dimension, that of the simulacrum. We are all Tasaday” (Baudrillard 1984, 257-258). A trope indeed to end all rhetoric, all discourse dealing with truth, reality, and other unrelenting life-and-death issues.
What escapes this postmodern sage but not the victims of his ludic legerdemain is the quite ordinary staple of bourgeois politics: publicity utilized for speculation and profit making. We are confronted by the hoax perpetrated by the Marcos regime, by elite bureaucrats and the military (not by ethnologists), who stand to gain by driving the Manobos (members of whom were forced to pose as a Stone Age tribe) from their mineral-rich homeland. This fabrication was then processed into commodity form by the National Geographic Society and other Western media mills reinforced by a gallery of spectators, including Gina Lollobrigida, relatives of General Francsico Franco invited by Minister Manda Elizalde, and Imelda Marcos, and other celebrities to which Baudrillard ascribes a tremendous mana power of transforming all reality into simulation. But this item is not a simulation: One of those who testified in an international conference in 1986 to expose this hoax, Elizir Bon, was killed in September 1987 by paramilitary agents near the Marcos-declared Tasaday reservation, while the rest of the “Tasaday” have been silenced by a machinery of terror that Baudrillard would rather ignore (Berreman 1990).
…In complicity with Western rationality, Baudrillard punishes the “Indians” (the Manobos are indiscriminately dissolved into erroneous generic classification) by depriving them of their history, their embeddedness in a specific sociocultural setting – in short, their integrity as humans. This is the textualizing revenge of imperial power on a world that dares claim precedence over it.
E. San Juan, Jr.,
After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-United States Confrontations
E. San Juan, Jr. to Baudrillard: No Investigation, No Right to Speak
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