A FASCINATING AUTHOR, ANTHROPOLOGIST, WORLD TRAVELLER, THINKER.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGOJJWVFIyY
I was so impacted by what he discusses and explains in this video about the importance of language and culture that I transcribed part of it.
What he says here completely explains what happened to us, to the Filipinos, when we turned out backs on our past to pursue the North American dream of affluence and modernity.
What happened when we turned our backs on TAGALOG, OUR MULTICULTURAL LINGUISTIC HERITAGE, INTERTWINED WITH SPANISH, AND OUR already 333-year-old HISPANIC-FILIPINO CULTURE.
....................
From
the video entitled “Wade Davis on Humans”
Edmund Wade Davis CM (born December 14, 1953) is a Canadian cultural anthropologist, ethnobotanist, photographer, and writer.
Davis came to prominence with his 1985 best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow about the zombies of Haiti. He is professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia.
One
of the most important things people don’t understand is that there’s so much
talk about biological loss and people forget about the loss of languages. This is my mission.
People
forget, in all of our concern for the erosion of biological diversity, we
forget that there’s a parallel process of loss, which is the erosion of our own
human legacy.
The
erosion of what you might call “the ethnosphere”. And you could define the
ethnosphere, the cultural or social sphere as a web of life that envelops the
planet as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, ideas and myths,
intuitions and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since
the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity’s great legacy, it’s a
symbol of all that we have achieved, and the promise of all we can achieve, as a wildly creative and innovative
species. And just as the biosphere is being
severely eroded with the loss of habitat and the concomitant loss of plant and
animal life, so too is the ethnosphere, but, if anything, at a far greater
rate.
No
biologist would say that 50% of all forms of life are on the brink of
extinction, because it’s simply not true. And yet that, the most apocalyptic scenario
in the realm of biological diversity, scarcely approaches what we know to be the
most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity, and the great
indicator of that is language loss.
When
you were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on Earth. Now a language is
not just grammar and vocabulary: it is a flash of the human spirit. And of
those 6,000 languages, today, fully half aren’t being taught to children, which
means that, effectively, they are on their way to extinction.
Think
about what that means. It means, by
scientific definition, in a generation or two, we are losing half of humanity’s accumulated wisdom, knowledge
of the spirit, intuitions about the nature of life, relationships to the
natural world. Half of humanity’s
repertoire slipping away in a generation.
There
are many people who say, whoa, wait a minute, wouldn’t the world be a better
place if we all spoke one language, wouldn’t communication be facilitated,
wouldn’t it be easier for us to get along? And my answer to that is always to
say, “What a great idea. But let’s make that language Yoorban, let’s make it
Haida, let’s make it Tibetan, let’s make it Quechua, Guaraní.” And, you know,
suddenly you begin to feel, a native speaker of English, what it would be like
to be enveloped in silence, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of your
ancestors or to anticipate the promise of your descendants. And yet, that dreadful plight is indeed the
plight of somebody, somewhere, roughly every fortnight, because on average every
two weeks, some elder dies and carries
with them into the grave, the last syllables of the ancient tongue.
And
this is a very vital and essential thing to understand, because the same forces
that are affecting cultural diversity are affecting biological diversity.
You
know, when we think of culture we think that, somehow, these people are quaint and colorful, but
failed attempts at being modern, destined to fade away. As if they can’t keep up with change. Well, you know, change is the one constant in history. All peoples, in all valleys, have always
been dancing with new possibilities for life. Change is no threat to culture,
nor is technology. I mean, the Lakota
Sioux did not stop being Lakota when they gave up the bow and arrow in favor of
the rifle any more than the American farmer stopped being an American when he
gave up the horse and buggy in favor of the automobile. It’s not change, or
technology that threatens the integrity of culture: it’s power. It’s the crude reality of domination.
In
every case, these are not frail and fragile societies that are destined to fade
away, any more than the forests in which they live are destined to be felled. These
are dynamic, living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable
forces. And the same forces affecting the cultures, egregious industrial
decisions, intrusions that are biologically unsustainable, disease entities,
the ideological force of political or industrial ideas --- all of these forces
sweeping over the planet are the forces created by human beings. And if human
beings are the source of the problem, we can be the foundation of the solution.
I
think one of the things in forgetting that we ourselves are a culture, is that
we forget that, when we project around the world, say, an economic system, call
it globalization or what have you, we present it as if it’s the inexorable wave
of history, as opposed to what it is: one means of organizing economic
activity that came out of our own
particular form of cultural lineage. And
we project it overseas with the assumption that, if people somehow buy into it,
they’re gonna somehow magically achieve our level of prosperity.
Well,
as E.R. Wilson says, just on the level of energy consumption alone, it would
take four planet Earths to support the energy consumption per capita that we
enjoy in the United States, and it ain’t gonna happen. What indeed does happen is, either drawn
by the allure of the modern, coerced into it, seduced into it, people turn
their backs on their past, hoping perhaps to achieve our level of affluence,
but invariably they secure only a place on the lowest rung of an economic
ladder that goes nowhere.
And
if there’s one thing that history, and anthropology in particular, teaches, is
that culture is not trivial. Culture is not feathers and bells. Culture is the blanket of ethical and moral
values that we insulate the individual with, and keep at bay the barbaric heart
that history teaches us lies just beneath the surface of the living.
It
is culture that allows us to find sense out of sensation, to find order in a
universe that may have none, it is culture that allows us to do as Lincoln
asked us to do, to look for the better angels always of our nature. And if you
wanna know what happens when culture is lost, and yet the shadow, the
individual survives, kinda… a shadow of his former self, you know, cut adrift
from the foundations and comfort of tradition, but facing an uncertain future,
of economic chaos, you only have to look at Mogadishu [Somalia], you only have to look at The Shining Path at the
gates of Lima [Peru], the Maoists
at the gates in Kathmandu, the chaos of places like Ecuatorial West Africa… you
suddenly see that culture is not trivial, and the maintenance of both the
integrity of culture and the integrity of the ecological systems upon which
cultures depend, is not an issue of romantic nostalgia, it’s not… it’s an issue of geopolitical survival.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
