The Wonder of the Ethnosphere

As we drift toward a more modern, homogeneous world, the loss and transformation of indigenous societies and their knowledge, myths and imagination is a indeed a blow to the richness of humanity's diversity.    I just read  Light at the Edge of the World:  A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures by renowned anthropologist Wade Davis.  It's an eloquent and passionate portrayal of traditional peoples in remote areas and their different ways of thinking,  living and being.  I chose to simply provide you with a few excerpts from the book which, I hope, will inspire you to look into his work.


"Worldwide, some 300 million people, roughly 5 % of the global population, still retain a strong identity as members of an indigenous culture, rooted in history and language, attached by myth and memory to a particular place on the planet.  Though their populations are small, these cultures account for 60 % of the world's languages and collectively represent over half of the intellectual legacy of humanity. Yet, increasingly, their voices are being silenced, their unique visions of life itself lost in a whirlwind of change and conflict.

There is no better measure of this crisis then the loss of languages.  Today, of the roughly six thousand languages still spoken, fully half are not being taught to children, meaning that, effectively, they are already dead, and only three hundred are spoken by more than a million people.  More than a cluster of words or a set of grammatical rules, a language is a flash of the human spirit, the filter through which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. A language is as divine and mysterious as a living creature.  The biological analogy is apropos. Extinction, when balanced  by the birth of a new species, is a normal phenomenon.  But the current wave of species loss due to human activities is unprecedented.  Languages, like species, have always evolved.  Before Latin faded from the scene, it gave rise to a score of diverse but related languages.  Today, by contrast, languages are being lost at such a rate, within a generation or two, they have no chance to leave descendants.  By the same token, cultures have come and gone through time, absorbed by other more powerful societies or eliminated altogether by violence and conquest, famines, or natural disasters.  But the current wave of assimilation and acculturation, in which peoples all over the Earth are being drawn away from their past, has no precedent.

Each language is, in itself, an entire ecosystem of ideas and intuitions, a watershed of thought, an old growth forest of the mind.  Each is a window into the world, a monument of the culture that gave it birth, and whose spirit it expresses.  When we sacrifice a language, we might as well drop a bomb on the Louvre.  The ultimate tragedy is not that archaic societies are disappearing but rather vibrant, dynamic, living cultures and languages are being forced out of existence.

Even among those sympathetic to the plight of small indigenous societies, there is a mood of resignation, as if  these cultures are fated to slip away,  reduced by circumstance to the sidelines of history, removed from the inexorable progression of modern life.  Though flawed, such reasoning is perhaps to be expected, for we are all acolytes of our own realities, prisoners of our perceptions, so blindly loyal to the patterns and habits of our lives we forget that, like all human beings, we too are enveloped by the constraints of protection of culture.  To dismiss indigenous peoples as trivial, to view their societies as marginal, is to ignore and deny the central revelation of anthropology.

In Haiti, a Voudoun priestess responds to the rhythm of drums and, taken by the spirit, handles burning embers with impunity.  In the Amazonian lowlands, a Waorani hunter detects the scent of animal urine at forty paces and identifies the species that deposited in the rain forest.  In Mexico, a Mazatec farmer communicates in whistles, mimicking the information of his language to send complex messages across the broad valleys of his mountain homeland.  It is a vocabulary based on the wind.  In the deserts of northern Kenya, Rendille nomads draw blood from the faces of their camel and survive on a diet of milk and wild herbs gathered in the shade of frail acacia trees.  In Borneo, children of the nomadic Penan watch for omens in the flight of crested hornbills.  On an open escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadows of clouds cast upon ice.

Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention.  Our way of life, with its stunning technological wizardry, its cities dense with intrigue, is but one alternative rooted in a particular intellectual lineage.
The Polynesian seafarers who sense the presence of distant atolls in the echo of waves, the Naxi shaman of Yunnan who carve mystical tales into rock, the Juwasi Bushmen who, for generations lived in open truce with the lions of the Kalahari, reveal that there are other options, other means of interpreting existence, other ways of being.

Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the common problems that confront us all.  Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world but of realms of the spirit, intuitions about the meaning of the cosmos, insights into the very nature of existence."

Wade Davis