Controversy over the authenticity of the primitive Tasaday tribe discovered in the Philippines in 1971, as well as the selective portrayal of other indigenous groups like the Yanomami in the Amazon, the!Kung San of South Africa, and the “hoaxing” of Margaret Mead in Samoa, point to the need to examine mass media portrayals of anthropological field studies. Portrayals of so-called lost tribes are examined in this article in terms of anthropologists' struggle with their discipline's colonial past and the popularity of primitivity as a theme in global media discourse in which characteristics of ethnic cultures are unfairly reduced to a single dimension.
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