Wade Davis: The Modern Voice of Ancient Wisdom

“Of the 7,000 lan­guages spo­ken today, fully half are not being taught to chil­dren,” Davis recently remarked. “Effectively, unless some­thing changes, they will dis­ap­pear within our lifetimes.”

The Wayfinders

A selec­tion of Davis’s cul­tural explo­rations is detailed in his book The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. In it Davis details five spe­cific regions of the world that he has explored through the years, along with an in-depth look at the indige­nous peo­ples of those areas. It is also an insight­ful exam­i­na­tion of wis­dom and tech­nol­ogy that, due largely to the arro­gance of early con­quer­ing explor­ers, have either been totally lost or are in dan­ger of being lost. “I would say absolutely that The Wayfinders expresses my pri­mary mis­sion as an explorer and anthro­pol­o­gist,” Davis told Organic Connections.

“When I was recruited to the National Geographic as an Explorer-in-Residence, my mis­sion as a social anthro­pol­o­gist was to deal with the cri­sis of lan­guage loss and the ero­sion of cul­tural diver­sity,” Davis explained. “I real­ized that could best be done through sto­ry­telling. Just prior to that I had writ­ten a book called Light at the Edge of the World, and for the next ten years I went all over the world for the Geographic mak­ing films, writ­ing arti­cles, but mostly researching.

“We couldn’t just go out to cel­e­brate the ‘exotic other’; we had to take our huge audi­ence to places where the belief sys­tems and prac­tices were so amaz­ing you couldn’t help but come away with a new appre­ci­a­tion of the won­der of cul­ture. In many ways The Wayfinders sums up those journeys.”

The Journeys

In The Wayfinders, we travel with Davis on his voy­age aboard the Hokule’a, a replica of the great sea­far­ing canoes of ancient Polynesia. The early European explor­ers’ dis­missal of the Polynesian peo­ple as “primitive”—a label they took back home and which stuck for hun­dreds of years—caused them to over­look one of the most uniquely civ­i­lized and wise cul­tures on Earth, from whom they could have taken quite a few lessons in nav­i­ga­tion. Armed only with a deep sense of waves, clouds, sea life, wind and the stars, tra­di­tional Polynesian nav­i­ga­tors (called wayfind­ers) guided such ves­sels over tens of thou­sands of miles of ocean, mak­ing their way from island to island, cre­at­ing trade, con­tact and the spread of tra­di­tion that lasted thou­sands of years. Very for­tu­nately, this skill sur­vives today, and read­ers are lucky enough to be wit­ness to it through Davis.

There were also sophis­ti­cated cul­tures that never had con­tact with the Spanish explor­ers, and had lit­tle to no con­tact with the out­side world well into the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. Davis him­self spent time with many of these. For exam­ple, the Waorani hunters of the Amazon, with whom Davis lived, could smell ani­mal urine at forty paces in the for­est and iden­tify the species. They had learned through gen­er­a­tions to inge­niously manip­u­late plants, and the poi­sons extracted from these allowed them to fish and hunt. They had also dis­cov­ered meth­ods of grow­ing plen­ti­ful food despite nutrient-poor soils of the rainforest.

Another cul­ture with which Davis has spent con­sid­er­able time is the Penan, a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers in Borneo. The tra­di­tional ter­ri­tory of the Penan is the for­est of the upper Baram River, the largest river in the north­west Sarawak region of Borneo; and the Penan cycle through this ter­ri­tory, com­mit­ting to knowl­edge every point along a trail, every boul­der and cave, and every one of some 2,000 streams.

The social struc­ture of the Penan stands in stark con­trast to the indi­vid­ual spe­cial­iza­tion that typ­i­fies Western cul­ture. Each mem­ber of the Penan group is fully capa­ble of per­form­ing every nec­es­sary task. They can fab­ri­cate every­thing needed from raw mate­ri­als found around them. Since sol­i­dar­ity is of utmost impor­tance to their sur­vival, con­fronta­tion is quite rare. Sharing is not only part of their eth­nic, it is of the high­est pri­or­ity. In fact, Davis describes a visit by a group of Penan to Canada in which they were astounded at the exis­tence of home­less­ness in such an afflu­ent soci­ety. The great­est trans­gres­sion in their cul­ture is known as sihun—which is essen­tially a fail­ure to share.

Why Were They Overlooked?

Davis points out that the for­mer dis­missal of such cul­tures had its roots in older Western think­ing, which skewed sci­en­tific obser­va­tion. “In the early days of anthro­pol­ogy, cul­ture was seen as a sort of evo­lu­tion­ary set of pro­gres­sions, whereby indi­vid­ual soci­eties move from the so-called sav­age to the bar­bar­ian to the civ­i­lized,” he said. “Each of those stages was seen to be marked by cer­tain tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions. It cre­ated this whole notion that there was this lad­der of suc­cess that invari­ably placed Victorian England at the apex.

“Anthropology’s mis­sion of deci­pher­ing another cul­ture so that we might learn more about our own human nature—and human­ity as a whole—got hijacked by the age. For exam­ple, the term sur­vival of the fittest was coined by Herbert Spencer, who was in fact an anthro­pol­o­gist. They were bor­row­ing from Darwin to try to cre­ate a kind of social Darwinian model of advancement.”

It wasn’t until the late nine­teenth cen­tury that this started to change, with the inno­va­tions of Franz Boas, con­sid­ered the “father of American anthro­pol­ogy.” “Boas became con­cerned that research was plagued by prob­lems of per­cep­tion, and that came to fas­ci­nate him,” Davis con­tin­ued. “He began to ask, ‘What is the nature of know­ing? Who decides what is to be known? What is this thing that we call cul­ture?’ He really believed that every social com­mu­nity, every kind of clus­ter of peo­ple dis­tin­guished by lan­guage or adapted incli­na­tion, was a unique facet of the human legacy.”

Davis has fol­lowed in Boas’s foot­steps in many ways—not the least of which being that Boas began as a physi­cist and changed dis­ci­plines, to anthro­pol­ogy, in fol­low­ing his study. “I began my aca­d­e­mic career in a very serendip­i­tous way, stum­bling into anthro­pol­ogy just because it seemed like an inter­est­ing thing to study,” said Davis. “I then slipped away from anthro­pol­ogy for about eight years and became a botanist—my PhD is actu­ally in biol­ogy as a botanist and eth­nob­otanist; I found plants a won­der­ful con­duit to culture.”

After a time, how­ever, Davis began to tire of sim­ply col­lect­ing plant spec­i­mens and yearned for a deeper exam­i­na­tion of cul­tures. A pro­fes­sor of his—the renowned Richard Evans Schultes—gave Davis an assign­ment that changed his life: go to Haiti and study the phe­nom­e­non of zom­bie rit­u­als, which had been steeped in sen­sa­tion­al­ist mys­tery for cen­turies. “It focused a kind of eth­nob­otan­i­cal lens upon a phe­nom­e­non that had been really dis­missed in an explic­itly racist way, that of the Haitian zom­bie,” Davis said. “I was sent down to Haiti to find the quote-unquote ‘drugs’ or the poi­son used to make zombies—but no drug can make a social phe­nom­e­non. I ended up explor­ing the social, polit­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal and spir­i­tual dimen­sions. That really flung me back into the realm of a cul­ture, and then I wrote my first two books on voodoo and the Haitian society.”

One of those books, The Serpent and the Rainbow, became an inter­na­tional best­seller and was ulti­mately made into a film. Davis has remained on his true path ever since.

From Childhood

Davis’s life­long explo­ration of cul­tures began in his youth in Canada. “I grew up in Quebec at a time when the English and the French didn’t speak to each other,” he related. “It was a small sub­urb of Montreal that had been sort of plunked like a car­bun­cle on the back of a very old and tra­di­tional French vil­lage. There was actu­ally a road that divided the two com­mu­ni­ties. I used to go down to the cor­ner to a lit­tle mom-and-pop gro­cery there and pick up things for my mother. I would look across that boule­vard and think, ‘Wow, across that road is another lan­guage, another reli­gion, another way of being,’ and it intrigued me. I was also intrigued by the sub­tle prohibition—not from my fam­ily as much as from society—against cross­ing that line. Then I had an older step­sis­ter who sort of shat­tered that divi­sion by falling in love with a fran­coph­one boy, and in the wake of her pass­ing through, I sort of floated in like flot­sam and began to hang out in the vil­lage. I think that cre­ated a cer­tain sense about the mean­ing of cul­ture: how could it be that those peo­ple right across the road could be so different?

Click any image to enlarge.

“Then when I was 14 my par­ents, who were very open to the world, sent me to Colombia with a teacher and a group of stu­dents on what was prob­a­bly an exchange pro­gram. We went down and were bil­leted out with fam­i­lies, and I was for­tu­nate to be bil­leted with a fam­ily that lived not in the afflu­ent neigh­bor­hoods of the city of Cali but up in the moun­tains in more mod­est cir­cum­stances. I never saw the other Canadians for the eight weeks that I was in Colombia, which is a long time when you are just 14 years old. It turns out that some of the other fel­lows, sev­eral of whom were two years older than I was, got rather home­sick. By con­trast, I felt like I had finally found home in Latin America.”

Sacred Headwaters

But it isn’t just far-off places and peo­ples that Davis befriends, or dis­cusses in The Wayfinders. He him­self owns and lives part time in a lodge in British Columbia’s Spatsizi Wilderness, the clos­est pri­vate hold­ing to what is known as the Sacred Headwaters, a con­flu­ence of the sources of three majes­tic rivers. Ten years ago the native peo­ples of the area—with whom Davis had made great friends—had their sacred and pris­tine lands threat­ened by oil and min­eral explo­ration. Over the years Davis has pro­vided plen­ti­ful assis­tance to them in cam­paign­ing to save their lands, through lec­tures, arti­cles and a mag­nif­i­cent book enti­tled The Sacred Headwaters: The Fight to Save the Stikine, Skeena, and Nass, which lov­ingly doc­u­mented with breath­tak­ing pho­tographs and descrip­tions this unspoiled wilder­ness des­tined to be com­pletely destroyed.

Shell Canada had secured per­mis­sion from the Canadian gov­ern­ment to explore and exploit the area for oil and nat­ural gas. “I think that when Shell came into the area, they were com­pletely unaware that there was this rich cul­tural his­tory,” Davis said. “Nobody even knew how much that coun­try was revered by the First Nation peo­ple there, the Tahltan. This, after all, is a quar­ter of British Columbia, the size of Oregon, which, at the time Shell obtained these rights, had a sin­gle road and very lit­tle devel­op­ment. The Tahltan stood up for their coun­try on a series of block­ades that lim­ited access to the heart of the Sacred Headwaters. This gen­er­ated a tremen­dous amount of inter­est, and when Shell went to nego­ti­ate with the Tahltan peo­ple, Shell’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives were asked to leave.”

As a result of the coop­er­a­tive efforts of Davis, the Tahltan and other groups, Shell com­pletely with­drew from the area. “It came about through a won­der­ful com­bi­na­tion of local people—certainly the Tahltan and non­na­tive local people—and then my own abil­ity to take the story beyond British Columbia: to have arti­cles in National Geographic, and to raise the pro­file of the place, begin­ning in 2003. I was also able to go down to the TED con­fer­ence and make a pre­sen­ta­tion in front of the senior per­son for Shell in all of the Americas, in an audi­ence which was made up of some of the most extra­or­di­nary and suc­cess­ful peo­ple in the country—from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, to Al Gore, and stars such as Cameron Diaz and Paul Simon. So I think being able to put this issue onto a global stage like that became very helpful.”

River Notes

Another exam­ple of Davis’s deep research into place and cul­ture is his recently pub­lished River Notes, designed to be a com­pan­ion to explor­ing the Colorado River.

“I was invited by a good friend of mine, Greg MacGillivray, to make an IMAX movie in the Grand Canyon,” Davis recounted. “I’m a pro­fes­sional white­wa­ter guide from British Columbia, so I jumped at the oppor­tu­nity to do the iconic river of the American Southwest. As I was going down the river, I became aware of curi­ously how lit­tle lit­er­a­ture there is on the river. There are lots of photo books and there are plenty of great guide books, and there are a num­ber of per­sonal reflec­tions of going down the river.

“But there are a sur­pris­ingly small num­ber of books that take up the whole sub­ject of the canyon, its his­tory, its geol­ogy, its ethnog­ra­phy and the water cri­sis. So I decided to write a lit­tle book. I delib­er­ately wanted it to be a short book, which is why I called it River Notes; I wanted it to be some­thing that you car­ried in your dry bag or your back­pack as you either hiked the canyon trails or went down the river.

“It’s just one book that can tell you who the ancient Anasazi were, why these dams got built, what the geol­ogy is that you’re look­ing at. It can tell you about the native peoples—the Havasupai, the Hualapai, the Paiute, the Ute—who Powell was and what he rep­re­sented in American his­tory. It explains that the whole set­tling of the American West was based upon a kind of Mormon ide­ol­ogy and trans­for­ma­tion, and how that dif­fered from what the Hopi were think­ing. What is it that is caus­ing the river to go dry before it reaches the sea? What could we pos­si­bly do to bring that river back to life?”

Natural Lessons

Davis’s unique expo­sure to a vast panorama of cul­tural her­itage has given him a respect for diverse approaches to liv­ing. As our Western attempts to con­quer nature have resulted in envi­ron­men­tal crises, there may be much to gain from explor­ing cul­tures based on nat­ural harmony.

“Other peo­ples of the world are not failed attempts at being you, or failed attempts at being mod­ern,” Davis con­cluded. “Each is a unique answer to a fun­da­men­tal ques­tion: What does it mean to be human and alive? When the peo­ples of the world answer that ques­tion, they do so in 7,000 dif­fer­ent voices, and those voices collectively—and the con­tent of what they are saying—become our reper­toire for deal­ing with the chal­lenges that will con­front us as a species in the com­ing cen­turies. Every cul­ture deserves a place at the coun­cil of human knowl­edge and wis­dom, and every cul­ture has some­thing to teach the world.”

Wade Davis’s books The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World and River Notes are avail­able at the Organic Connections bookstore.