Death and life in the ethnosphere - The Naked Geography Of Hope

Remy_3D

by Wade Davis

In Haiti, a Vodoun priestess responds to the rhythm of drums and, taken by the spirit, handles burning embers with impunity. In the Amazon, a Waorani hunter detects the scent of animal urine at forty paces and identifies the species that deposited it. In the deserts of northern Kenya, Rendille nomads draw blood from the faces of camels, and survive on a diet of milk and herbs gathered in the shade of frail acacia trees. On an escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadow 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 in the West, with its stunning technological wizardry, its cities dense with intrigue, is but one alternative rooted in a particular intellectual lineage. Polynesian seafarers who sense the presence of distant atolls in the echo of waves, Naxi shaman of Yunnan who carve mystical tales into rock, Juwasi Bushmen who have lived for generations in open truce with the lions of the Kalahari, reveal other options, means of interpreting existence, ways of being.

Together the cultures of the world make up an intellectual and spiritual web of life, an ethnosphere that envelopes and insulates the planet, and is as vital to our collective well-being as is the biosphere. Think of the ethnosphere as the sum total of thoughts, beliefs, myths, and intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. It is humanity's greatest legacy, the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species.

Tragically, just as the biosphere is being severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere, and at a far greater rate. No biologist would dare suggest that half of all species are on the brink 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 cultures.

The key indicator is language loss. Every two weeks an elder carries a language to the grave. Of the 6,000 languages still spoken, fully half are not being taught to children. A language is not merely a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules; it is a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Within a single generation, we are witnessing the loss of fully half of humanity's legacy [see special section on disappearing languages, Whole Earth, Spring 2000--Ed.].

HAITI

Anthropologists are sometimes accused of endorsing an extreme relativism. Quite to the contrary, anthropology seeks not the elimination of judgment but merely its suspension, in order that the judgments we are ethically obliged to make may be informed by deep understanding. The anthropological lens focuses most sharply when turned to those situations in which a people and a culture have been unjustly pilloried because of traditions and beliefs that outsiders, in their ignorance, fail to understand.

Consider Haiti. When I traveled there to seek the formula of the folk preparations reputed to be used to create zombies, my first challenge was to set aside all of my preconceptions about this remarkable land and the religion of its people. It's curious. If I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what would you say? Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism.... There is always one place on the planet left out: sub-Saharan Africa, the tacit assumption being that African people had no formal religion. Of course, by ethnographic fact, they did.

Vodoun is not a black magic cult, but rather the distillation of profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic diaspora of the slavery era and were sown in the fertile soil of the New World. A complex metaphysical worldview, it is a dynamic faith in which the dead give birth to the spirits, and the spirits in turn may be invoked by the living such that the believer for a brief shining moment actually becomes the god.

It is the quintessentially democratic faith, for the believer not only has direct access to the divine; he or she actually becomes the spirit. The Haitians, indeed, walk in and out of their spirit realm with an ease and impunity that has always astonished the ethnographic observer. When Joseph Campbell was asked to name one religion on Earth where the people actually live their spiritual convictions, his choice was Vodoun. As the Haitians say, white people go to church and speak about god, we dance in the temple and become god.

Spirit possession for the Haitian is not a moment of social pathology, but the hand of divine grace. Once taken by the spirit, the acolyte becomes the god, and as a god cannot be harmed. Thus one sees in Haiti a window open wide to the mystical. Individuals' handling of burning embers is an astonishing example of the power of the mind--when catalyzed during a state of extreme excitation--to affect the body that bears it.

Vodoun is not an animistic faith, but the spirits are known to dwell in places of great natural beauty. The believer is drawn to these places in the same spirit in which we are drawn to a cathedral. We do not worship the building. We go there to be in the presence of God.

One of the most amazing places on the Voudon annual round is a sacred waterfall called Saut D'Eau, where as many as 15,000 acolytes dressed in robes move across the limestone escarpment with the motion of night clouds, to descend on an amphitheater, a sacred waterfall illuminated by the glow of a thousand candles adorning the branches of a sacred mapou tree that towers over the falls. Merely to step behind the veil of the falling water, the thin cold blood of the divine, is to become possessed by Damballah-Wedo, the serpent god of Dahomey, the repository of all spiritual wisdom. At any one point in time you'll see dozens of acolytes slithering across the wet stones like the serpent in a state of grace. A man enters the waterfall fully clothed to allow the power of the falls to tear off his clothes so that, like the sacred snake that sheds its skin to emerge renewed, he will emerge renewed for the coming year.

To be sure, there is sorcery in Vodoun. To ask why is to ask why there is evil in the universe. The answer, if there is one, was given by Lord Krishna when he told a disciple to thicken the plot. Every religion has a notion of light and darkness. In Christianity the fallen archangel becomes the devil, the Christ child is the son of God. The struggle is to resolve this dichotomy in harmony such that light overcomes darkness, good outshines evil.

The zombie phenomenon is a narrow thread of darkness within the luminosity of the Vodoun culture and faith. The sorcerers do make a powder that can induce apparent death, but zombification turns out to be a form of social sanction, the ultimate punishment invoked by secret societies that are amongst the most powerful arbiters of social and politic life in rural Haiti. If I were sent to Haiti to find the chemical basis of a social phenomenon, I would, in the end, explore the psychological, spiritual, political, and cultural dimensions of a chemical possibility.

BORNEO

I have always been fascinated by nomads, because for most of our million years of human history, we were all nomads, wanderers on a pristine planet. It was only with the Neolithic revolution 10,000 years ago that we succumbed to the cult of the seed, and the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the organized priesthood. With agriculture came sedentary life and the creation of surplus, which allowed for the formation of hierarchies.

Nomadic life is profoundly different. Given that everything must be carried on the back, there is no incentive to accumulate possessions. Hence, in a nomadic culture, the wealth of currency of the society is the strength of the relationships among people. Sharing becomes an involuntary reflex because you never know who will be next to bring home the food for the table.

After my time in Haiti, I traveled to Borneo to seek out one of the last nomadic peoples of Southeast Asia, the Penan, a people of the rainforest of the northern third of Borneo. Along its rivers, which drain into the South China Sea, lived a number of indigenous cultures, collectively known as Dyaks, the same as headhunters. Before a young man married, he had to present to his perspective father-in-law the severed head of an enemy; too often those heads were Penan.

[ Last edited by Remy_3D on 5-8-2004 at 11:44 PM ]

Remy_3D

So the Penan fled into the forest, where to this day they live. At one point they were 30,000 strong. In the Penan homeland everything came from the forest itself, whether it was the water gathered in bamboo tubes, or fish gathered with extraordinary toxins that stun the fish so that they float to the surface and can be readily harvested.

But if I went to Borneo hoping to find a place wet with the innocence of birth, I found myself instead on the front lines of one of the most dramatic struggles of our time. In the 1980s, when international attention was focused on the Amazon, Brazil produced less than 2 percent of the whole tropical log exports of the world. Malaysia produced close to 45 percent, most of it from the homeland of the Penan peoples.

The Penan have seen roads pierce the wild heart of their homeland. The basis of the existence of one of the last nomadic cultures in the world is being destroyed. Throughout the homeland of the Penan, sago and rattan, palms, lianas, and fruit trees lie crushed on the forest floor. The hornbill has fled with the pheasants, and as the trees fall in the forest, a unique way of life--morally inspired, inherently right, and effortlessly pursued for centuries--is collapsing in a single generation.

Bewildered, the Penan found themselves living in resettlement camps, watching the rivers that once ran clear carry away the silt of an island continent to the South China Sea where Japanese freighters hang on the horizon, ready to fill their hulls with the raw logs ripped from the heart of Borneo.

Beginning in the mid-eighties, the Penan, in a rather extraordinary way, said enough was enough. In what began as quixotic gesture, blow pipes against bulldozers, they blockaded the logging roads, and for a time shut down all logging in Sarawak. This gesture electrified the international environmental community, but of course it did not last.

In 1998 I returned to Sarawak on behalf of National Geographic and found myself living with a small band of seventeen individuals, among the last nomadic Penan in Sarawak.

The situation of the Penan is emblematic of the dark undercurrent of our time--the fact that a hundred years from now the twentieth century will not be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations, but as the era in which we stood back and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet.

Many people view this process of condensation as progress, the inevitable consequence of modernity. Indigenous cultures, though quaint and colorful, are seen as somehow destined to fade away, as if by natural law. This is not true. Neither change nor technological innovation implies the elimination of culture. Change is the one constant in history. All peoples through all time have engaged in an endless process of adaptation to new possibilities for life.

It is not change that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power, the crude face of domination. The ultimate tragedy is not that archaic societies are disappearing but that dynamic living cultures are being forced out of existence by the specific political and economic decisions of powerful outside entities, whether it's the egregious deforestation of Sarawak, the poisoning of the fertile soils of the Ogoni, or Tibet's domination by the Chinese. That all of these conflicts result from deliberate human choices is both discouraging and empowering. If people are the agents of cultural loss, we can also be the facilitators of cultural survival.

CANADA

I want to close with a more positive story from my own homeland of Canada. Canada has not always been kind to the Inuit. In fact during the 1950s, in an effort to establish Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic, we obliged the Inuit to move into settlements, but in April of 1999, the Canadian government, in a remarkable gesture of restitution, established an Inuit homeland, known as Nunavut--a territory the size of Texas and California combined, in which 26,000 Inuit exercise total administrative control.

The Inuit's story is an extraordinary tale of perseverance, patience, and cultural survival. The Inuit know a great deal about survival. When I was narwhal hunting at the tip of Baffin Island, I recorded a remarkable story recounted by a man named Olayuk of his father who refused to go into settlements.

Remember that for the Inuit blood on ice was not a sign of death; it was an affirmation of life. The cold was not to be feared, but to be taken advantage of. Olayuk's father refused to go into the settlements, so the family took away his tools and his implements, hoping that it would oblige him to enter the settlements. Did it? No. He simply stepped outside into an Arctic night and in the darkness pulled down his trousers and defecated into his hand. As the feces froze he shaped them into a blade, put a spray of saliva along the edge, and as the shit knife took form, butchered a dog. He skinned the dog with the knife, made a harness, took the rib cage of the dog and made a sled and, harnessing up an adjacent dog, disappeared over the ice flows.

In the end I think it's important to heed what Margaret Mead said, that her biggest nightmare was that as we drifted towards a monochromatic world of monotony from a polychromatic world of diversity we would drift into this blandly amorphous generic world culture in which the whole human spirit and soul was reduced to a single modality. Her greatest nightmare was that we would wake as from a dream and forget that there had ever even been any other options.

If a Martian anthropologist were to arrive on Earth and take the measure of our civilization, if the measure were technological prowess, he would see marvelous things, but if there were other criteria, he might stand aside. What if, for example, he took notice of the fact that 20 percent of the people control 80 percent of the wealth; that though we honor the institution of marriage, half of marriages end in divorce and only 6 percent of us have our elders living amongst us; that we embrace an obscene slogan like "24/7," implying as it does the end of family yet explaining why the average American father spends eighteen minutes a day in direct communication with his children--not to mention the propensity we have to rip down the ancient forest, tear holes in the heavens, and change the biochemistry of the entire planet?

In other words the Western world is not the paragon of human potential. We are one facet of the human repertoire, one facet of the human diamond. In the end we need the visions of these other peoples, just as we need the richness of the biological worlds in which they live, because for all of us they stand apart as symbols of the naked geography of hope.

Best known as an anthropologist and ethnobotanist, Wade has made 6,000 or so botanical collections while living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight South American countries. He was recently appointed as "explorer in residence" with the National Geographic Society. His long string of mind-opening, assumption-cracking books includes Passage of Darkness, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest, Nomads of the Dawn, The Clouded Leopard, Shadows in the Sun, Rainforest, and One River.

Although he travels to places as distant as Borneo, Tibet, the higher Arctic, and Kenya, he maintains deep roots in his birthplace in British Columbia, where he has worked as a guide, park ranger, forestry engineer, and ethnographer, and continues to spend as much time as he can in the woods of the Stikine Valley.

This article was adapted, with Wade's generous assistance, from a talk at the 2001 Bioneers Conference.