Davis, Wade. Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures. Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, BC. 2001.
- Wade Davis is an “Explorer-in-Residence” at the National Geographic Society. He’s most famous for his 1985 book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, about zombies in Haiti. This is a concise little easy read about various Nature-based cultures around the world.
(xi) I sought to escape from a monochronic world of monotony, in the hope that I might find in a polychromatic world of diversity the means to rediscover and celebrate the enchantment of being human.
(5) As linguist Michael Krauss reminds us, the most pessimistic biologist would nor dare suggest that half of all extant species are endangered or on the edge of extinction. Yet this, the most apocalyptic assessment of the future of biological diversity, scarcely approaches what is known to be the best conceivable scenario for the fate of the world’s languages and cultures.
(6) 300 million people, roughly 5 percent of the global population still retain a strong identity as members of an indigenous culture…thought their populations are small, these cultures account for 60 percent of the world’s languages.
- the creeping hegemony of technocratic civilization
(7) Of the 175 Native Languages still alive in the US, 55 are spoken by fewer than ten individuals…Of the 80 languages spoken in CA at the time of European contact, 50 remain, and none are spoken by a child.
- 175 still alive today. How many distinct cultures were there before Europeans? Again, if a fundamental characteristic of modern civilization is that it destroys human diversity (as well as environmental diversity, of course), then how can it possibly be a good thing?
(13) Every culture is ethnocentric, fiercely loyal to its own interpretation of reality. Without such fidelity, the human imagination would run wild, and the consequences would be madness and anarchy.
- therefore, faith and fanaticism save us from this madness
- without a “channel of beliefs,” the mind would explode into a loss of identity
- what happens when the “human imagination” has instant access to almost all other interpretations of reality, via internet and television??
- faith and fanaticism must become increasingly irrational
(20) David Maybury-Lewis had traveled to central Brazil in the mid-1950s to investigate the so-called Ge’ anomaly. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, anthropologists had maintained that technological sophistication and material well-being were a direct measure of the complexity of a culture, a convenient concept that invariably placed Victorian England at the top of the Darwinian ladder to success. Modern ethnographers rejected the notion, arguing that every human culture had, by biological definition, the same mental acuity. Whether this potential was realized through technological prowess or by the elaboration of intensely complex threads of memory inherent in myth was a matter of cultural choice and historical circumstance.
- if technological prowess results in global hegemonic tyranny/monoculture, then when do we decide to abandon that technological prowess?
- Ge’ language family of central and western Brazil. Also studied by Levi-Strauss.
(22) The quest for balance [between seeming opposites such as male/female, night/day, wild/tame, etc], Levi-Strauss maintained, was a fundamental human urge, a key adaptive trait that allowed peoples such as the Bororo [Ge’ language family] to come to terms with the fragility of their lives and the harshness of the natural world that surrounded them. At the very least, it provided an illusion of control, that in their scattered encampments they were not utterly at the mercy of the fickle forces of life and death. Modern industrialized society has precisely the same need to insulate the individual from nature and indulges in similar illusions that it can be accomplished. The difference lies in the medium. We build machines and dwell in cities. The Ge’ peoples find protection in a web of ideas, beliefs, and ritual practices dreamed into being at the beginning of time.
- The more hospitable the environment, the less inclination to “transcend” the environment with technology. And transcending the environment also means conquest, expansion. It is the first step toward the end of the planet.
(35) In order to measure the duration of a story, the length of a myth, it was not enough to set a timepiece. One had to move through geography, telling the tale as one proceeded.
(36) For Alex and his father [Gitxsan people of Skeena Country, NW British Columbia], were completely confounded by the Christian notion of heaven. They could not believe that anyone could be expected to give up smoking, gambling, swearing, carousing, and all the things that made life worth living, in order to go to a place where they did not allow animals. “No Caribou?” they would say in complete astonishment. They could not conceive of a world without wild things.
- the fact that “the Christian notion of heaven” is taken as a given for millions of modern people is a sign of our collective sickness.
(50) [Kogi people of the Sierra de Santa Marta, Columbia] Those who are chosen for the priesthood through divination are taken from their families as infants and carried high into the mountains to be raised by mamos [priests, spiritual trainers]. For eighteen years they are not allowed to meet a woman of reproductive age or to experience daylight, forbidden even to know the light of a full moon. They sleep by day, waking after sunset, and are fed a simple diet of boiled fish and snails, mushrooms, grasshoppers, manioc, squash, and white beans. They must never eat salt or food not known to the ancients, and not until they reach puberty are they permitted to eat meat.
(75) [Among the Winikina-Warao, canoe builders of the Orinoco, the largest indigenous society to have survived in Venezuela] Before a child can walk, he or she can paddle…I grew used to the sight of three-year-old boys and girls, alone, fearlessly maneuvering small dugout canoes across the wide expanse of the river.
(119). Haiti left me convinced that cultural beliefs really do generate different realities, separate and utterly distinct from the one into which I had been born. During subsequent years, as my travels led to other parts of the world, the forests of Borneo and the Tibetan Plateau, the deserts of East Africa and the ice floes of the Arctic, memories of Haiti continued to serve as a lens through which I took the measure of a place, knowing always that each culture represented, by definition, a unique facet of the human legacy and promise. The more intensely I embraced this notion, the more I came to see in the sweep of modernity an impending catastrophe, as we drift away from diversity, as languages are lost and ancient peoples are convulsed in an upheaval of violence and transformation.
(122) It is not change that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere, it is power, the crude face of domination.
- again, the creeping hegemony of technocratic civilization
(124) In their isolation, the Waorani [Ecuador Amazon] had been astonishingly healthy. Medical studies at the time of contact revealed a people essentially disease-free, with no history of cancer or heart ailments, and no evidence of exposure to polio, pneumonia, smallpox, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid fever, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, serum hepatitis, or the common cold. They had practically no internal parasites and virtually no secondary bacterial infections.
(138) The Penan [Borneo, see Stranger in the Forest] have no writing, so their total vocabulary at any one time is the knowledge of the best storyteller. There is one word for ‘he,’ ‘she,’ and ‘it,’ but six words for ‘we.’ There are at least eight words for sago, because it is the plant that allows them to survive. Sharing is an obligation, so there is no word for ‘thank you.’
- ie, “the Piraha think..” We instead of I, in Don’t Sleep There are Snakes
(139) Language provides clues to a complex social world utterly different from that of sedentary people. The nomadic Penan have no sense of time, know nothing of paid employment, of poverty. They have no notion of work as a burden, as opposed to leisure as recreation.
- Time is different for people who move with the seasons/cycles of nature. Sedentary people sense time as moving from behind to forward while people and events are motionless points within it. This is by no means a natural sense of time, and wasn’t such for 99% of human history.
- see Edward T Hall for different cultural realities of Time
(144) ‘The nation state has become too small for the big problems of the world, and too big for the little problems of the world,’ Daniel Bell.
(171) ‘Religion is poison. It neglects material progress,’ Mao to the Dalai Lama, upon their last meeting.
(186) The Aborigines had no metal tools, knew nothing of writing, had never succumbed to the cult of the seed. Without agriculture or animal husbandry, they generated no surpluses and thus never embraced sedentary village life. Hierarchy and specialization were unknown..
- see Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James C. Scott.
(187) Aboriginal languages, which may have numbered 250 at the time of contact, are disappearing at the rate of one or more per year. One eighteen are today spoken by as many as five hundred individuals.
(188) What of the other victims of European expansion? The people of Tasmania were exterminated within seventy-five years of contact. The Reverend John West, a Christian missionary, rationalized their slaughter: ‘Their appearance is offensive, their proximity obstructive, their presence renders everything insecure. Thus the muskets of the soldier, and those of the bandits, are equally useful; they clear the land of a detested incubus.’
Within a generation of Captain James Cook’s landing in Oahu, only thirty thousand Hawaiians survived out of an original population of some eight hundred thousand. In the Caribbean, on the island of Hispaniola, the Arawakan population of well over a million was eliminated within fifteen years.
- See American Holocaust, Stannard and The Conquest of America, Todorov.
(189) In central Mexico, the population, densest in the Americas, collapsed from twenty-five million to two million within sixty years of the conquest of the Aztec. As late as 1800, California had an indigenous population of three hundred thousand; by 1950, their descendants numbered only ten thousand. Nine million died in Peru. Twenty-three million in Mexico. Another five million in the Amazon alone.
- How can we comprehend all these millions of human lives? All at the expense of modern progress for Euro-Americans??
- For California, see An American Genocide, Madley, and Indian Survival on the California Frontier, Hurtado.
(191) In the Arctic, one marvels at the art of survival…Inuit women cut open animals to feed on clam siphons found in walrus stomachs, lichens and plants in the guts of caribou, mother’s milk in the bellies of baby seals. They store meat taken in August in skins and bladders cached in rock cairns, where it ferments to the consistency and taste of blue cheese.
(193) There is a well-known account of an old man who refused to move into a settlement. Fearful for his life, and hoping to force him off the ice, his family took away all of his tools and weapons. So, in the midst of a winter gale, he stepped out of their igloo, defecated and shaped the feces into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva. With the knife, he killed a dog. Using its rib cage as a sled and its hide to harness another dog, he disappeared into the darkness.
(199) The triumph of secular materialism is the conceit of modernity.