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The Wayfinders
7-11-2018
For me, summertime is reading time — a habit formed in childhood thanks to the local library’s summer reading program and one I still cherish. For the next few columns, I’ll be sharing book reviews starting this week with “The Wayfinders” by Wade Davis.
Davis is a world renowned anthropologist, and is currently the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at UBC where he also teaches. He has written 15 books, all focused on showing how diversity within the world’s cultures helps to enlarge and explain the human experience: the “how” and “why” of being human. “The Wayfinders” is a compilation of his talks as part of the 2009 CBC Massey lecture series. Through vignettes highlighting different ways of living among indigenous peoples such as the San people of southern Africa, the Barasana people of the Amazon Basin in South America, the Penan people in Malaysia, and the Inuit people in northern Canada, Davis clearly shows that lifestyles are reflections of our values and beliefs.
Davis refers to Franz Boas, a German scientist who introduced the idea of cultural relativism and rejected the notion that cultures progress through linear stages with some being primitive and others advanced. Boas promoted understanding instead of classification. This does not mean that all human activities are equally condoned or that we must accept abhorrent behaviour; it means that we are ethically obliged to make informed judgments taking into account alternate world views and to stop assuming our way of looking at reality is the only sensible way.
In the Western world, we’ve embraced science and rationality as our guiding lights. Davis fully acknowledges “our achievements to be sure have been stunning, our technological innovations dazzling.” And yet, he recommends taking a second look at our accomplishments: “Were societies to be ranked on the basis of technological prowess, the Western scientific experiment, radiant and brilliant, would no doubt come out on top. But if the criteria of excellence shifted, for example to the capacity to thrive in a truly sustainable manner, with a true reverence and appreciation for the earth, the Western paradigm would fail. If the imperatives driving the highest aspirations of our species were to be the power of faith, the reach of religious longing, then our dogmatic conclusions would again be found wanting.”
The Western world excels in many areas, but definitely not in all ares, and always at a cost. Davis sums up our Western lifestyle as “extreme” — for we are “a civilization that contaminates with its waste the air, water, and soil; that drives plants and animals to extinction on a scale not seen on earth since the disappearance of the dinosaurs; that dams the rivers, tears down the ancient forests, empties the seas of fish, and does little to curtail industrial processes that threaten to transform the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere.” For everyone to enjoy our level of luxury, we would require the resources of four planet Earths, an obviously impossible option.
Once we look through an anthropological lens, we see viable alternatives exist. Davis is not suggesting that we abandon our homes to live off the grid, but he is advocating for the need to preserve each other’s rights to honour one’s culture, for culture is the “blanket of comfort that gives meaning to life.” When people are stripped of their culture in the name of “progress” their debasement has long-lasting consequences. Davis points to the Boxer Rebellion in China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the al Qaeda movement in the Arab world as examples of what happens when people react against pressures to “Westernize.” Humiliation fuels hatred. To dismantle a people’s lifestyles and decimate their culture because we don’t understand it, don’t choose it for ourselves, or feel they are impinging on our ability to extract resources needed to maintain our commodified lifestyle, we play a reckless game where we all end up reduced.
Davis sums it up thusly: “To acknowledge the wonder of other cultures is not to denigrate our way of life but rather to recognize with some humility that other peoples, flawed as they too may be, nevertheless contribute to our collective heritage, the human repertoire of ideas, beliefs, and adaptations that have historically allowed us as a species to thrive. To appreciate this truth is to sense viscerally the tragedy inherent in the loss of a language of the assimilation of a people. To lose a culture is to lose something of our selves.”
Information about Wade Davis, including where to purchase his books, is available at https://daviswade.com/ Zainab Dhanani can be reached at z_dhanani@yahoo.ca
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