This past week and a bit have been chaos central with a number of things going on round my neck of the woods. Some of which are your usual academic doledrums, but some of which were pretty inspiring overall. I guess the thing that has been most on my mind was my role as a "producer" of sorts for a high-profile speaker series at UBC. Two days ago we had a visit by National Geographic Explorer in Resident, Wade Davis, so only now, are my wedding planner type instincts starting to die down.
For those of you, who have never heard of Wade Davis, he is quite an extraordinary individual whose blurb would read as follows:
Wade Davis is an anthropologist, botanist, best-selling author, and National Geaographic Explorer in Resident. He spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections. Davis's work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986).
Davis has published scientific and popular articles on subjects ranging from Haitian voodoo and Amazonian myth and religion to the global biodiversity crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the ethnobotany of South American Indians. His photographs have been published widely. Recently Davis's work has taken him to Peru, Borneo, Tibet, the high Arctic, the Orinoco Delta of Venezuela, and northern Kenya.
Anyway, Wade was wonderful. Not only did he give a great talk, but the fellow was kind enough to let us really pack in his schedule with additional student contact time. Although refreshingly down to Earth and jovial in person, his prose in both his manner of public speaking and especially in his writing is lovingly eloquent.
This, we got to see in his talk at our Chan Centre - entitled "Cultures on the Edge", the talk was based on his book and TV series, "Light at the Edge of the World," where for about an hour and a half, he essentially explored the plight of vanishing and challenged cultures.
Here's a gist of it:
Just as there is a biological web of life, there is also a cultural and spiritual web of life--what we at the National Geographic have taken to calling the "ethnosphere." It's really the sum total of all the thoughts, beliefs, myths, and institutions brought into being by the human imagination. It is humanity's greatest legacy, embodying everything we have produced as a curious and amazingly adaptive species. The ethnosphere is as vital to our collective well-being as the biosphere. And just as the biosphere is being eroded, so is the ethnosphere--if anything, at a far greater rate.
Some people say: "What does it matter if these cultures fade away." The answer is simple. When asked the meaning of being human, all the diverse cultures of the world respond with 10,000 different voices. Distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself, morally inspired and inherently right. And those different voices become part of the overall repertoire of humanity for coping with challenges confronting us in the future. As we drift toward a blandly amorphous, generic world, as cultures disappear and life becomes more uniform, we as a people and a species, and Earth itself, will be deeply impoverished.
...
Language isn't just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules; it's a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. When you and I were born there were 6,000 languages spoken on Earth. Now, fully half are not being taught to schoolchildren. Effectively, they're already dead unless something changes. What this means is that we are living through a period of time in which, within a single generation or two, by definition half of humanity's cultural legacy is being lost in a single generation. Whereas cultures can lose their language and maintain some semblance of their former selves, in general, it's the beginning of a slippery slope towards assimilation and acculturation and, in some sense, annihilation. (more)
All in all, very impressive. The terry.ubc.ca website should have his talk up in the near future, so I'll make certain that I highlight that here when the time comes. It's definitely worth checking out.
P.S. That National Geographic gig sounds pretty sweet - gotta get me one of those...
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Thanks. This is an important message that merits a wide audience.
As eloquent as he is, I worry that Davis' comment may understate the consequences of monoculture dominance (especially if the dominant culture is a destructive and dysfunctional one).
Do you think the audiences leave with a lasting understanding of a serious problem -- a problem that has consequences for the dominant culture as well as the extinct cultures?
I think so - his message isn't necessarily forceful, but it tends to be very powerful. His tact seems to be to use his cconsiderable skill as a storyteller to illustrate the wonders of the many challenged cultures he has had an opportunity to see and work with.
And it's quite effective, because ultimately, the audience becomes immersed in this 1 hour snapshot (his talk is accompanied by wonderful photographs) of what it is that's at stake. Here, the effects for the cultures discussed is explicit, but the losses suffered by us, the dominant culture, I think is also obvious - primarily from the emotions the audience members must feel during his narrative.
Anyway, Wade was kind enough to let us videotape his talk, and also allow us to create an archived web version which will include the slide show. I think the audio might even be ready as early as this coming week. Keep an eye out at terry.ubc.ca - in fact, that site has a number of other excellent talks worth checking out.