Wade Davis: Culture is not Trivial

 

           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.

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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.