Image of Wade Davis via House of Anansi
Half of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today may disappear in our lifetime. This startling and sobering fact is the starting point for Wade Davis’s new book, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, a wide-ranging enquiry into what it means to see through the world through the particular prism of one’s own language and culture. Each of the world’s languages represents a unique and valuable way of interpreting the world, but as Davis writes, “every fortnight an elder dies and carries with him or her into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue.”
What does the extinction of many of the world’s indigenous languages mean to those of us who have never heard those languages spoken? Why do we need to preserve the planet’s linguistic and cultural store house of history and experience? The fantastically busy Wade Davis was kind enough to answer those and other questions from Washington, D.C., where he lives and works when he’s not back home in northern B.C. or traveling the world.
Davis is an author, anthropologist, ethnobotanist, filmmaker and photographer and currently holds the post of National Geographic Explorer in Residence. The Wayfinders was written as a series of lectures that Davis delivered for the CBC Massey Lectures 2009. You can listen to those lectures here on the CBC site and find out about the book, which contains information not included in the lectures, here.
Books: With so many overwhelming problems in the world – global warming, war, poverty – why should people in Tokyo or Vancouver or Toronto care about a language and culture dying in a remote corner of the planet?
WD: Well, it’s true that someone in Toronto probably won’t be immediately impacted if a tribal language and its culture dies somewhere in eastern Africa. Another way of looking at it, though, is to ask yourself, “Would an indigenous person in eastern Africa be particularly impacted if the language and culture of Toronto died?” No, they wouldn’t, but we all know that the world would be a more impoverished place if either of those cultures died. Most of the world will never see a Monet painting, most of the world will never hear a Mozart symphony performed, but the world would be a lesser place if either of those artists hadn’t lived.
Books: In The Wayfinders you write that “These (indigenous) voices matter because they can still be heard to remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual and ecological space.” Why are these alternatives important?
WD: To start, I’m not suggesting that anybody try to go back to a pre-industrial past any more than I’m suggesting that indigenous people be somehow kept from the benefits of modernity and science. It’s not about the traditional versus the modern so much as asking “What kind of world do we want to live in?” Do we want to have just one way of looking at the world? When I say that those voices are there to remind us that there are other options, part of what I’m saying is that we need to remember that all cultures are famously ethnocentric and myopic and focused on their own interpretations of reality. The names that many indigenous people give themselves translate as “The People,” the implication being that everyone else is savage beyond the pale. This is something that is found in cultures throughout the world. The Greek word “barbarian,” for instance, translates as “one who babbles.”
Books: How does that myopia play out in the contemporary world?
WD: Well, down here in America we practically celebrate our cultural myopia, to the point where we found ourselves in a situation where we were prepared to invade a country, Iraq, with a 4,000-year history that we had no understanding of. We invaded Iraq, but 65% of the non-military Provisional Authority members we sent to “save” or “redeem” or “transform” the country had never had had a passport before. Their trip to Baghdad was their first trip outside of North America. In other words, that kind of cultural myopia, which has created so much attention globally, is something we can no longer afford in an interconnected, multicultural world.
Also, the idea that there are other options for viewing the world does not necessarily mean that we should emulate those other options, the idea is to realize that the world we’ve created does not exist outside of history or culture. We have this tendency to believe that we are not a culture, we are the “real world.” We think that our institutions and beliefs are inviolable and set in stone. We don’t tend to be self-critical about our culture in the way that anthropology suggests we should all be. Because of that, we tend to see all other cultures as failed attempts at being us or as failed attempts at being truly modern like us. If we don’t accept that we are wrapped up in the same dynamic processes of change as every other culture, if we continue to believe that we are the real world, then we remain stuck in the way we do things and stuck in our responses to the crises facing us.
For instance, our way of seeing the landscape as a raw resource, as something inanimate to be extracted at our whim, means that we will keep extracting those resources while ignoring the devastating cost to our environment. If you want to know why these other cultures matter, think of two words: climate change.
Books: Can you expand on that idea?
WD: What I mean is, if you think of “modernity” as this inexorable wave of history – absolute, solid, impossible to transform or change – then you can quickly become discouraged and conclude that we must be on a train wreck with history. If you accept the science of climatologists and the prospects for the Earth in the wake of global warming, you become very discouraged. But what these other cultures suggest is not that we should mimic them or become like them but that there are other options for moving forward, that the world we’ve created is not irrevocable. Looking at the world through the vision of other cultures reveals the folly of those politicians and leaders and “experts” who say that we cannot change the way we do things.
The truth is, we all know that we must fundamentally change the way our culture interacts with the natural world. We know that, but how do we do it? What these cultures suggest is that this thing called “modernity,” however you describe it, is not something divorced from history or from culture, it actually has a very shallow history, perhaps 300 years. When you consider that our species descended from our progenitor 250,000 years ago and that the Neolithic revolution occurred 12,000 years ago and that our industrial society is scarcely 300 years old – you start to see that the well of history our culture draws from is very shallow. It suggests that maybe we don’t have all the answers to the challenges facing us in the new millennia.
Books: Isn’t science part of modernity, though?
WD: Of course. One of the things that I stress in the book is that in no way am I trying to be overly negative about my own scientific tradition. The triumph of science and modern medicine is something to celebrate – after all, no one who gets their arm ripped off in an accident wants to be taken to a traditional herbalist!
My point is that our culture, as brilliant as it is, is not the paragon of humanity’s potential. You have to accept the scientific fact that our economy is not the only way of generating surplus exchange and wealth and well being, it is a very specific set of relationships to resources to capital to each other and to labour that is this thing called modernity or capitalism or whatever moniker you want to put on it. But that particular way of generating revenue and economy has by definition been the mechanism that has brought us all to what may well be a pre-cataclysmic future in terms of carbon emissions. Climate change is not the consequence of humanity, it is the consequence of a very small sub-set of humanity that has been extraordinarily successful in so many ways. Again, though, it is not the only way of organizing human behaviour on the planet. The other cultures of the world are not failed versions of that model, they are each unique answers to the fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? When asked that question, a myriad of cultures in the world respond in 7,000 different voices. Each of those voices offers a different option and those options collectively become our human repertoire for dealing with the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. This is the important point, not that we try to go back to a hunting and gathering society but that we see our world view as one of many equally valid options.
Books: What positive things can we take from our world view moving forward?
WD: In our life time science has shown us to absolutely brilliant things. One of those is to show us the planet from space, a view that tells us that our world is not a limitless horizon but a blue planet floating in the velvet void of space. We are a finite sphere, and if you reflect upon that you see how fragile life is. You realize there are places where you can, in a day’s walk, reach a place where you cannot breathe for lack of oxygen. Of course I’m speaking about the Himalayas. This basic lack of oxygen above a certain altitude presents rather startling evidence of how thin the troposphere is – you can literally walk to a place where you can’t breathe. If that doesn’t tell you how thin the atmosphere that supports life is then I don’t know what will.
The other great revelation comes to us from the study of genetics, which I refer to in the first chapter of the book. Through this revelation we have realized that we all come from the same genetic cloth and that the very idea of race is a fiction. The genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum. That means that all cultures share the same genius – by definition! That puts a lie to the old colonialist conceit of a trajectory of genetic progress that allowed you to slot individual cultures like theatrical set pieces on an imagined evolution from the savage to the civilized, to a hut in Africa to the splendour of the Strand in London, a concept of the world that conveniently placed Victorian England at the apex of a pyramid sloping down to the so-called primitives of the world. We now recognize that as the 19th-century construction that it was, as irrelevant to us today as the Victorian notion that the world was 6,000 years old. If you take that revelation of genetics to its obvious conclusion, you realize that if all populations share the same genius, the same raw individual capacity and mental acuity, then how individual cultures and languages use that raw genius is simply a matter of choice.
We have, through the lense of our bias, measured success by technological wizardry. If that’s the only criterion, then of course the Western experiment, as marvelous as it is, “comes out on top.” If you measure success through a different set of criteria, perhaps the ability to live in a more sustainable way or perhaps a more subtle sense of the spiritual possibilities of the human heart, then our culture is not “on top” but some kind of lagging entity.
Our culture has created this very problematic situation for humanity, and it’s called climate change. This is not a problem created by the Inuit or the Tibetan Buddhists or the islanders from Satawal but a problem arising from a specific historical, cultural tradition, which is Western industrial society. That tradition has brought many wonderful things but also some huge problems. These other cultures don’t offer us blueprints for mimicry but they do offer symbols of hope that there are other ways of orienting ourselves in social, spiritual and physical space.
