Cultural Casebook: Still-Living Ancient Cultures

Wade Davis's book "The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World" is an utterly compelling, beautifully written series of pieces originally presented as lectures. Each piece describes a particular ancient culture that is still living, thriving and evolving today.

For example, the first chapter is about the ancient Polynesian art and science of long distance ocean navigation--using no instruments other than the perceptions, knowledge and experience of the human navigator, and the design of the canoe itself. The navigator does not sleep during the entire voyage, in order to keep the whole narrative of the voyage intact in his or her mind, using dead reckoning to know where he or she is now, in relation to the voyage up till now. By virtue of his or her ability to combine knowledge of the currents and waves, the travels of birds, the colours of the sea and the sky, the rising the setting of the stars, and a myriad of other natural data, the navigator positions the canoe on its voyage, and 'calls the islands up from the sea'.

By sharing his detailed, loving, knowledge about certain human civilisations, Davis implicitly and explicitly pleads for us to drop the Modernist fallacy that the "Western" secular, rational world view is the pinnacle of our development, and open our minds to entirely different--and one could say far superior--systems of conceiving of and interacting with the world. What matters, he says, is not which belief system is right or wrong per se, but rather "the potency of a belief, the manner in which a conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people, for in a very real sense this determines the ecological footprint of a culture...[determining] both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel them onward".

What metaphors propel you onward?

Here's an extract from the beginning of the book:

"Just to know that in the Amazon, Jaguar shaman still journey beyond the Milky Way, that the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, that the Buddhists in Tibet still pursue the breath of the Dharma is to remember the central revelation of anthropology: the idea that the social world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of intellectual and spiritual choices that our particular cultural lineage made, however successfully, many generations ago.

"But whether we travel with the nomadic Penan in the forests of Borneo, a Vodoun acolyte in Haiti, a curandero in the high Andes of Peru, a Tamashek caravanseri in the red sands of the Sahara, or a yak herder on the slopes of Chomolungma, all these peoples teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth. This is an idea that can only fill us with hope.

Together, the myriad of cultures makes up an intellectual and spiritual web of life that envelops the planet and is every bit as important to the well-being of the planet as the biological web of life that we know as the biosphere. You might think of this social web of life as the "ethnosphere", a term best defined as the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy. It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and all that we, as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species, have created."

(The bolding is mine.)