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The Wayfinders (CBC Massey Lecture)

4.24 of 5 stars 4.24 · rating details · 524 ratings · 82 reviews

s/t: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
The most prestigious and eagerly anticipated lecture series of the year, The CBC Massey Lectures are being delivered in 2009 by acclaimed author and anthropologist Wade Davis. Described as a "rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life's diversity," Davis is one of the most authori...more

Paperback, 262 pages

Published October 13th 2009 by House of Anansi Press (first published 2009)

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May 14, 2013 David Withun rated it 3 of 5 stars

Davis sets out in this book to prove the value of ancient wisdom to the modern world. The great hurdle he must overcome to do this is the great superstition of the present age: that newer always means better. Derived from this supposition are modern man's cocksure belief in his own superiority over his forefathers and the disdain with which he treats his heritage. Though these hurdles do cripple modern man and must be overcome and though Davis gives us a fascinating attempt at that, ultimately h...more Davis sets out in this book to prove the value of ancient wisdom to the modern world. The great hurdle he must overcome to do this is the great superstition of the present age: that newer always means better. Derived from this supposition are modern man's cocksure belief in his own superiority over his forefathers and the disdain with which he treats his heritage. Though these hurdles do cripple modern man and must be overcome and though Davis gives us a fascinating attempt at that, ultimately he fails to accomplish his goal.

Davis's ultimate failure in proving his point is largely the consequence of avoiding addressing it head-on until the final lecture. After a series of lectures in which Davis presents us with a pathetic set of descriptions of various examples of the Noble Savage and attempts, as is usually the case with such presentations, to wow us with his amazing prowess as a hunter/gatherer/navigator/animal tamer/navigator/[insert skill set here], he suddenly switches gears in the final lecture. He commits the unforgivable sin of non-fiction writing and offers us a surprise conclusion with a new focus on global warming.

Perhaps the greatest problem with Davis's lectures is his apparent disdain for his own culture, the only culture which provides anthropologists with an inclination to preserve minority cultures and a concern about the negative impact of certain technologies. On pages 216-7, Davis lists the various cultures he has discussed in his lectures and which he believes can provide the wisdom the modern world needs to overcome its current crisis, including Tibetans, Polynesians, Inuits, the descendants of Incas, and others. Notably absent from this list are any Western cultures, and yet these cultures, and the greatr cultural entity of Western Civilization, are equally endangered. Cultural literacy is at an all-time low and the very treatment Davis gives to Western culture in this book is evidence of the lack of esteem in which its own denizens and products hold it. If we wish to save the cultures of Tibet and the Andes and to cultivate an authentic appreciation for these cultures, perhaps the best place to begin is by rediscovering our own culture and developing an admiration for it. This admiration should, of course, be one that recognizes the limitations of our culture, but it should be an admiration nonetheless. The identification of scientism, materialism, and colonialism with the full range and depth of Western Civilization is false and fatal.

Davis does a good job of making the point that every culture says something unique and valuable about the human experience. If he would have finished this thought by applying it to his own culture, the book would have come full circle. If a conference of cultures and a renewal of received wisdom are what are called for, surely the Bible, Greece, and Rome have places of honor.

Davis's lectures are entertaining, enlightening, and engaging. They are filled throughout with insightful anecdotes and interesting stories. I recommend this book for anyone with an interest in anthropology. In spite of its shortcomings, this book does make for some very good reading.(less)

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Jan 19, 2013 Caren rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-nonfiction

There is a new book by Jared Diamond that is getting a lot of publicity, but it strikes me that Wade Davis lectured on a similar topic back in 2009 for the Canadian Massey Lecture Series, from which this book was taken.
(The Massey Lectures, a week-long annual series of lectures on a political, cultural, or philosophical topic, given by a scholar, have been around since 1961. The series is sponsored jointly by Canadian Broadcasting Corp. radio, Anansi Press--which then publishes the lectures in b...more There is a new book by Jared Diamond that is getting a lot of publicity, but it strikes me that Wade Davis lectured on a similar topic back in 2009 for the Canadian Massey Lecture Series, from which this book was taken.
(The Massey Lectures, a week-long annual series of lectures on a political, cultural, or philosophical topic, given by a scholar, have been around since 1961. The series is sponsored jointly by Canadian Broadcasting Corp. radio, Anansi Press--which then publishes the lectures in book form--, and Massey College of the University of Toronto.)
I stumbled upon this book while looking for something else entirely, and I consider it a sort of serendipity, since the book so challenged my very Western way of thinking. Davis is a botanist and an anthropologist who has studied very diverse native cultures. The point of the book, to me an any rate, is that, although these indigenous cultures are usually viewed by those of us in the West as primitive and backward, their ideas are actually more suited to their lands and climates than those of colonial cultures who have usurped their lands. In the lectures, he takes a closer look at Polynesians, who were navigating among far-flung islands of the Pacific long before any instruments of navigation had been invented; at the peoples living in the rain forests along the Amazon in South America; at the Aborigines of Australia;at the Tuareg of Africa; and at the First Nations tribes of Canada. He touches on other cultures along the way, but this book is so rich I am hard-pressed to do it justice in my own puny words. Permit me to share some quotes from the book with you.

To the rhetorical question, 'what difference does it really make to us if a small culture disappears?', he responds on pg. 166:
"...What does it matter if a single species of life becomes extinct? Well, imagine you are getting onto an airplane, and you notice that the mechanic is popping out the rivets in the wings. You ask the obvious question and the mechanic says, "No problem. We save money with each rivet and so far we've had no problems." Perhaps the loss of a single rivet makes no difference, but eventually the wings fall off. It is the same thing with culture. If the marathon monks cease to run, or if the children of the Mentawai shift their sense of beauty to something more mundane and uninspired, or if the Naxi shaman no longer write in stone and abandon their native script, Dongba, the world's last living hieroglyphic language, will the sky fall? No. But we're not talking about the loss of a single species of life or a single cultural adaptation. We are speaking about a waterfall of destruction unprecedented in the history of our species. In our lifetime half of the voices of humanity are being silenced.
The problem is not change. We have this conceit in the West that while we have been celebrating and developing technological wizardry, somehow the other peoples of the world have been static and intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Change is the one constant in history. All peoples in all places are always dancing with new possibilities for life......It is neither change nor technology that threatens the integrity of culture. It is power, the crude face of domination. We have this idea that these indigenous peoples, these distant others, quaint and colourful though they may be, are somehow destined to fade away, as if by natural law, as if they are failed attempts at being modern, failed attempts at being us. This is simply not true. In every case these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable and overwhelming external forces...."
[end quote]
I have marked many passages in this book, but they are too many to share. Let me continue with this quote from pgs. 193-195:
"We too are culturally myopic and often forget that we represent not the absolute wave of history but merely a world view, and that modernity--whether you identify it by the monikers westernization, globalization, capitalism, democracy, or free trade -- is but an expression of our cultural values. It is not some objective force removed from the constraints of culture. And it is certainly not the true and only pulse of history. It is merely a constellation of beliefs, convictions, economic paradigms that represent one way of doing things, of going about the complex process of organizing human activities. Our achievements to be sure have been stunning, our technological innovations dazzling.......But these accomplishments do not make the Western paradigm exceptional or suggest in any way that it has or ought to have a monopoly on the path to the future. An anthropologist from a distant planet landing in the United States would see many wondrous things. But he or she or it would also encounter a culture that reveres marriage, yet allows half of its marriages to end in divorce; that admires its elderly, yet has grandparents living with grandchildren in only 6 percent of its households; that loves its children, yet embraces a slogan -- "twenty-four/seven" -- that implies total devotion to the workplace at the expense of the family......Our way of life, inspired in so many ways, is not the paragon of humanity's potential. Once we look through the anthropological lens and see, perhaps for the first time, that all cultures have unique attributes that reflect choices made over generations, it becomes absolutely clear that there is no universal progression in the lives and destiny of human beings."
[end quote]
And finally, I'll close with this statement from pg. 198:
"Were I to distill a single message from these Massey Lectures it would be that culture is not trivial."
At the beginning of chapter four, Davis quotes Albert Einstein: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift."
This thought-provoking book gave me a nudge to listen to the intuitive and to look for answers outside of my own culture.

If you are interested in hearing Wade Davis speak, he has a couple of TED lectures archived here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_o...
(less)

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Aug 09, 2012 Linda rated it 5 of 5 stars

Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world is what Wade Davis wants us to understand. He points out universal attributes of indigenous peoples and how they are connected to the land and in tune with the natural world they inhabit. The early Polynesian navigators, or “Wayfinders”, could read the movement of the clouds, the stirring of the ocean currents and celestial movements. Long before European explorers like Captain Cook who claimed so many of the islands in the south Pacific to belong t...more

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May 16, 2012 Scott rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: essays, philosophy

This is the book version of the 2009 CBC Massey Lecture (the "pinnacle" of Canadian intellectualism, if you will). There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in these lectures, but there's a lot of problems as well. Davis' basic argument is this: there is a multiplicity of cultural expressions which humans have formed throughout their collective history; these expressions will take the form of a specific language; these specific languages each reflect a singular manner of interpreting, interact...more This is the book version of the 2009 CBC Massey Lecture (the "pinnacle" of Canadian intellectualism, if you will). There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in these lectures, but there's a lot of problems as well. Davis' basic argument is this: there is a multiplicity of cultural expressions which humans have formed throughout their collective history; these expressions will take the form of a specific language; these specific languages each reflect a singular manner of interpreting, interacting with, and understanding the surrounding world – in other words, specific language creates a unique reality. Davis’s vision is that every language/culture which has developed should co-exist on earth (keeping in mind that there is a natural life cycle of languages and culture) without hierarchy; these languages are also, ideally, always participating in a conversation which asks: what kind of world do we want to inhabit.

Having summed that up, I have to say that I can't disagree with anything he says directly: it's a beautiful vision of a world where all cultures co-exist peacefully and without hierarchy, and all voices are valued and listened to. Unfortunately the structure of these lectures actually contradicts the message Davis is attempting to convey. First, Davis claims he wants to value all voices and cultures of the world, yet it is clear that the Western, academic voice is, still, valued above all. The scientific history of human beings is presented as absolute truth (humans all came from Africa...etc.) - yet this "voice", if you will, is given a privilege that the other "voices" of the lectures aren't. It is clear that Davis believes that other cultures have something valuable to tell Western culture, but I don't honestly believe that Davis would give up the privilege he has as a Western academic. These "other" cultures are simply something that Davis dabbles in as an anthropologist, and these other cultures are never given their own voice - they are always translated through Davis's experience. Davis also claims at one point that the scientific history of human beings shouldn't conflict with the creation stories of many "traditional" cultures - but how does that work? It seems to me that Davis is just appropriating culture and wisdom from other peoples from his place of privilege as a Western academic(less)

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May 14, 2012 Thomas Vree rated it 5 of 5 stars

I’ve read several of his other books and this was just as magnificent. Whether writing or speaking, the mans words are a pleasure to read or hear. The section on the peoples of the Pacific in particular is amazing. Early European explorers of course arrogantly assumed that they were “primitive.” Their navigational abilities, that they could spread out across a huge part of the globe via small boats, centuries, possibly even millennia before Europeans could have achieved such a feat, proves that...more

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Jul 29, 2011 Sandra rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Fantastic book, by a great Canadian anthropologist/botanist writer from the Massey Lectures series about the importance of recognizing the value of individual cultures from Polynesian to Inuit. I was inspired to read this book after watching Wade Davis' ted.com talk on culture and one of his earlier articles in National Geographic on vanishing cultures. This book is written in an engaging narrative form and encourages readers to look beyond their own ethnocentric views of the Western world being...more

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Aug 09, 2010 Dana Larose rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: canadian-authors, owned

I picked this up on my recent Toronto trip. I'd heard one of the lectures (about the Polynesian wayfinders/navigators) on the CBC.

The lectures are an extended discussion about languages (and by extension their cultures) that are in danger of dying out, and why it's important for us to preserve them. Wade Davis has selected a variety of examples of cultures (usually aboriginal) that (1) have entirely different perspectives on the world than the Western cultures and (2) are threatened or still rec...more

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Jul 22, 2010 Brian rated it 5 of 5 stars

The essays in this wonderful collection were written for the celebrated Massy Series for CBC. Davis looks to the San tribe who live in the Kalahari desert, as how our ancestors lived before they migrated out of Africa and spread out over the world. The Kahari is one of the most hostile environments in the world. "In English we have 31 sounds. The San have 141, a cacaphony of clicks and cadence that many linguists believe echos the very birth of our language."

In Australia: "Knowing the extraordin...more

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Nov 27, 2009 BC rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: massey-lectures

I found this book a little difficult to follow. It wasn't that it was poorly written, or that the individual parts didn't make sense. I found myself waiting for the kicker in his argument, the part where he told the reader why ancient wisdom really does matter.

The chapters all told very compelling stories about various indigenous cultures, and documented the decline of these same cultures in the face of "economic development". Davis talks about different ways of seeing the world, and various re...more

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Jun 30, 2012 Tom rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Wayfinders existed first as a series of lectures and the lecture format clearly informs the book. The prose -- which is graceful, evocative, and slightly formal -- has the cadence of spoken language. The downside of the lecture format, however, is that the depth of each segment is limited. Davis's scope is broad and I found myself repeatedly wishing he would delve deeper into the topics he discusses. This is not a criticism. Rather, it is a tribute to Davis's ability to provoke interest in a...more

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Mar 18, 2012 Stven rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: those who can change

Recommended to Stven by: Wade Davis on Charlie Rose

Imparted here is a vast and fascinating range of knowledge about dozens of great civilizations. All too many times the story of a great civilization is its centuries of a flourishing, complex way of life, destroyed in a generation by the encounter with the superior weapons and inferior insight of technological Europe and its descendants.

This book is the preservation of a series of lectures commissioned for the University of Toronto. Mr. Davis is a genuine world explorer and a genuine intellectua...more

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Apr 17, 2010 Justin rated it 5 of 5 stars

With the converging crises of imminent energy scarcity, environmental degradation, resource depletion and economic insolvency, suddenly I’m recognizing the apogee of our modern civilization may have passed us by a few decades ago. Being on the slope of globalization’s decline as opposed to its ascent or plateau is a precarious position, mainly because the evidence increasingly indicates an ever more bleak definition of the future. But that’s precisely why I found Wade Davis’ 2009 CBC Massey Lect...more With the converging crises of imminent energy scarcity, environmental degradation, resource depletion and economic insolvency, suddenly I’m recognizing the apogee of our modern civilization may have passed us by a few decades ago. Being on the slope of globalization’s decline as opposed to its ascent or plateau is a precarious position, mainly because the evidence increasingly indicates an ever more bleak definition of the future. But that’s precisely why I found Wade Davis’ 2009 CBC Massey Lectures collected in The Wayfinders so deeply inspiring. The way we define our lives and the meaning of being a human is far from an absolute and objective answer to reality, it has been the result of numerous decisions made in a compounding form over hundreds of years. Because humanity at large expresses itself in the form of modernity is largely a result of the ever growing demand our lifestyle has on ever more hard to reach raw material inputs. Although I listened to this entire series of lectures through the CBC Ideas Podcast, Davis’ presentation hit me with much more gravity the second time around.

The genius and intelligence recognized by modern humanity is only in that of highly advanced technology while the genius of the cultures detailed in The Wayfinders takes many different forms. Each culture is far from trivial but an answer to the questions that come with being human, all of these answers just as impressive as our own. Our tendency is for to look at the naked and painted body of the native as a failed attempt at modernity. A native to be saved by induction into our economic system with all the benefits of employment and monetary exchange. Even until the 1960’s some Australian textbooks included the Aboriginals among, “interesting animals of the country”. To this point Davis quotes from the testimony of a Penan nomad to the UN General Assembly in 1992, “The (Malaysian) government says that it is bringing us development. But the only development that we see is dusty logging roads and relocation camps. For us, their so-called progress means only starvation, dependence, helplessness, the destruction of our culture and the demoralization of our people. The government says it is creating jobs for our people. Why do we need jobs? My father and grandfather did not have t o ask the government for jobs. They were never unemployed. They lived from the land and from the forest. It was a good life. We were never hungry or in need… In ten years all the jobs will be gone and the forest that has sustained us for thousands of years will be gone with them.”

Davis is able to continue his discussion without resorting to the “noble savage” or the Hobbesian, “nasty, brutish and short” dichotomy. For the cultures he touches on from Australia, the Americas, Africa and Asia it is clear that a genius is required to flourish in harsh environments, against any odds we would consider possible. And all of this despite harmful environmental degradation brought about by our lifestyle. Denial of climate change is a luxury provided by a temperate environment and disconnection from the natural world. For native peoples, when the glaciers their ancestors have worshiped for generations are disappearing and the Arctic lands they’ve hunted annually for all of history fail to freeze but for a few months there is no ideology, only survival.

I was nearly drawn to tears by the examples of rituals and lifestyles Davis uses to illustrate the depth of beauty of human experience. The Pacific islanders sailing thousands of kilometers between beautiful islands with wind blowing through their hair to complete the Kula gift sharing ring live the lives we can only experience through fictional characters projected onto glowing rectangles. The indigenous have no sense of paid employment, of work as burden as opposed to leisure as recreation. These cultures are the definition of the human experience that we have lost and try to replace through futile substitutes. These people experience pain and suffering along with glory and triumph, but through the full spectrum of being human, as opposed to our path which fails in its attempts to shield us from the realities of death and darkness.

These cultures have disappeared rapidly over the last hundred years, entire ways of life wiped out in less than a generation. Davis wonders why we have a universal rejection of genocide yet the ubiquitous practice of ethnocide destroys more than individuals but whole solutions to the human experience. We may discredit an indigenous approach to life, but they disdain the fact that so many of our own suffer from abject poverty. A native tribesman from Malaysia when observing the homeless in Canada said, “How can homelessness exist, a poor man shames us all.”

The most important lecture included in this collection was the discussion of sacred geography, of the stewardship shown by indigenous to their land. When the Spanish tore down Incan churches and monuments, building Christian churches and monasteries in their place, the native villagers celebrated because this further confirmed the sacredness of those sites. Likely not the reaction the Spanish intended. If we are to look at cultures in terms of success and failure, wouldn’t the successful culture be the one that has survived for over 50,000 years in the harsh deserts of Australia as opposed to our modern world on the verge of extinction after only 300? An idea of a sacred connection to land may be dismissed as meaningless supersition, but if it does not draw from an actual spirit world, perhaps it was the technological solution created long ago to ensure our species wouldn’t destroy the earth.

Davis has convinced me that when we talk about threats to our planet such as climate change or peak oil, we’re really talking about the end of our globalized civilization and not the extinction of humanity. Our species can exist in many other forms that live far more meaningful lives than the “modern man”. And for that reason, no matter how bleak the global situation may appear to be, the existence of the indigenous and their ability to maintain ancient wisdom despite all odds is a reason for hope.(less)

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Apr 30, 2012 tamarack rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The world is still a mysterious and undiscovered place. Polynesian seafarers traverse the ocean without a compass. Aborigines cross the desert with song as their guide. Japanese monks run 80 kilometres a day for one hundred days as just a part of their initiation. “The myriad of cultures of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us. They are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to the fundamental question, What does it mea...more

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Sep 05, 2011 Isaac Yuen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Brilliant Book. Davis seems to have been EVERYWHERE, but never loses that sense of awe and wonder that pushes the reader to genuinely think about human experiences beyond his/her own. He notes that cultures and languages are being lost at a rate greater than biodiversity loss, and the wonders of human achievements and resilience are being wiped out. Culture is a funny thing: It can unite societies, but it is immensely fragile. Thousands of years of adaptations, oral history and knowledge, can be...more Brilliant Book. Davis seems to have been EVERYWHERE, but never loses that sense of awe and wonder that pushes the reader to genuinely think about human experiences beyond his/her own. He notes that cultures and languages are being lost at a rate greater than biodiversity loss, and the wonders of human achievements and resilience are being wiped out. Culture is a funny thing: It can unite societies, but it is immensely fragile. Thousands of years of adaptations, oral history and knowledge, can be be wiped out within a single generation of ignorance and neglect.

The book explored the various ways different cultures found their way in the world. Some examples: Aborigines practiced environmental stewardships for TENS of thousands of years, although they have no need for the concept of linear time. Polynesian navigators became human supercomputers in order to find specks of land across the vast Pacific Ocean without compasses, sextants, and GPS's. Nomadic tribes in Northern Kenya accrued huge herds of cattle as an adaptation to a land of recurring drought. These practices were all woven elaborately into the customs and traditions of each unique culture; it’s all very fascinating stuff.

In modern times, we have a tendency to dismiss these incredible and ingenious achievements that allowed indigenous people to survive and thrive. Sometimes it's unintentional; other times it's outright disturbing. Heyerdahl of the Kon-Tiki fame, ignited the public’s imagination with his voyage across the Pacific, but dismissed the reams of evidence that pointed to this great achievement was of Polynesian origins. An Australian politician in the 20th century declared that “there is no scientific evidence the the aboriginal is a human being at all”, a commonly held notion that led almost to the extinction of one of the oldest and continuous ways of life in the world. Development agencies, with the noble intentions of helping nomadic tribes settled, destroyed a culture that was developed around surviving drought.

All of these intriguing insights address the central question of the book: Why are cultures worth saving? I’ll leave with one of the most powerful passages of the book:

"Were I to distill a single message from these Massey Lectures, it would be that culture is not trivial. It is not decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has either. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insultates a people from the barbaric heart that history suggests lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all humans. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature. (p. 198)"

Powerful stuff.

I highly recommend this book. As modern Western culture continues to grapple with issues of depression, meaning, and what it means to become an adult human being, I can't help but feel that there are things we can learn from other cultures that can help us live more resilient and enriching lives.(less)

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Dec 28, 2012 Stephen Wong rated it 5 of 5 stars

In his 1962 Massey Lectures titled The Educated Imagination, the literary critic Northrop Frye asked us not just to read and enjoy the reading of literature but to begin to look at "literature as a whole" even as we do so. In his 2009 Massey Lectures called The Wayfinders, the anthropologist Wade Davis asks us not just to gain an understanding of what he termed the "ethnosphere" but also, perhaps in the spirit of Frye nearly fifty years later, to look at "humanity as a whole" (p. 165). This "as...more In his 1962 Massey Lectures titled The Educated Imagination, the literary critic Northrop Frye asked us not just to read and enjoy the reading of literature but to begin to look at "literature as a whole" even as we do so. In his 2009 Massey Lectures called The Wayfinders, the anthropologist Wade Davis asks us not just to gain an understanding of what he termed the "ethnosphere" but also, perhaps in the spirit of Frye nearly fifty years later, to look at "humanity as a whole" (p. 165). This "as a whole" perspective Davis encourages his reader/listener to take in view not of an expanding galaxy of variation and canonicity that is literature (as in Frye) but of the inevitable and irreversible extinctions of cultures and ways of life.

Wade Davis makes a case beautifully not simply about privileging less of the totalitarian sway of the notion of Western progress, specifically of the technological and market liberalism kind of the last 300 years, but even more strongly the case for the millennia-old cultures that have managed to persist in the face of a modernizing onslaught and the reach of a blind globalization that readily throws away environment-specific wisdom and particular adaptations that are now at risk of disappearing forever. A more eloquent and rational position for the protection of humanity's variety of ways of life in relation to the planet and attenuating the homogenizing force of modernity and globalization and its attendant neuroses and pathologies would be harder to find articulated in Western thought for our times.

Sharing from his direct experiences among the peoples he writes about, from the deserts of Africa, the dreamlands of Australia, the wide expanse of sea of Polynesia, the jungles of the Amazon and Borneo, the flanks of Everest, the territory of Nunavut in the High Arctic, to the Sacred Headwaters of his own homeland in the Northwest Pacific, the power of Wade Davis' stories and narratives should give us not just the extraordinary travelogue of a keen observer and guide to the humanity around the world we never knew but also its homing beacon across time of humanity's existence. All this allows us to put on "humanity as a whole" and gives us a chance to wear less of what our globalised culture imposes and pretends as the be-all and end-all (of what is really only its destructive power) for the necessary "ancient wisdom" of encircling care upon which this our careless modern world cares only to visit a severe and dire extinction.(less)

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May 24, 2010 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars

Fantastic! Probably a modern classic of anthropology. Davis is an incredibly interesting Canadian ethnobotanist/anthropologist and this book is a compilation of several talks called the Massey Lectures. I was lucky enough to hear him give a summary version of these lectures at the IB conference in Singapore this year. As a National Geographic explorer in residence, he also had an amazing slide show to accompany his talk.

The basic crux of the essays in this book is that languages, and therefore c...more

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Jun 06, 2010 Nicole rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book provided fascinating examples and made a convincing argument for why cultural preservation is necessary. Davis managed to celebrate the successes of indigenous cultures and their views of the world and suggest what we might learn from them without falling into the trap of overgeneralizing about or romanticizing them (for example, by asserting that they were always in harmony with their environment when it's clear from examples like Rapa Nui that that's untrue). I do wish that Davis had...more

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May 10, 2012 Hope rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: matters-of-the-heart-mind-spirit, creating-intentional-spaces, memoirs-biography-essays-thoughts, myth-magic-and-shamanism, travel-and-culture

A most extraordinary and important book... an examination of "other" (fast disappearing) cultures and what we might learn from their ability to live in harmony with their environment, no matter how inhospitable. The subtitle: "Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World," gives but an inkling of its depth and breadth. It's one of those books where you immediately put everything the author has ever written on your wish list... Fascinating anthropology, engaging, readable ... and incredibly rel...more

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Dec 20, 2010 Mauberley rated it 4 of 5 stars

I received this as a gift and I confess that I wasn't sure what to expect. What a pleasure, then, to enter into such a wise and wonderful book. Davis makes a strong case for cultural ecology all the while celebrating humanity's rich and irreplacable ways of being human. Culture, he tells us, isn't folk songs or blankets, it is a 'blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives...a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness...'. As I...more

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Jan 16, 2013 Ben rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: critiques-of-civilization, required-reading

I mostly really liked this book. There were a couple things that bothered me. One was Davis stating that all of the flightless birds of New Zealand went extinct following human colonization. This just isn't true. There are several flightless bird species still living in New Zealand. He also makes a point that essentially states that technologies don't change people. Also not true. Lewis Mumford covers this concept in Technics and Human Development, and Jacques Ellul covers it well in The Technol...more

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Mar 05, 2013 Obak Beches rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorite-read-books

Living in America and being from a Pacific island, Palau, the evidence of ethnocide is now very serious and felt even through Facebook.. from what we see and hear through statuses, video feed, to even phone calls home. Rapid erosion of foreign adulterated agencies just suffocating the last of our native breath out of us. Yet, we blind ourselves even weakening ourselves by succumbing to the need to a global pressure to conform... we along with our children sadly mistake this for progress and sing...more

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Jan 15, 2011 Daniel Kukwa rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

I have never had such a deep or varied taste of ancient, nearly extinct cultures…and I’ve never come away feeling so guilty about being descended from imperialist, domineering, conquering, barbaric European stock. "The Wayfinders" is a testament to humanity’s legacy…both good and bad…and acts as wisdom and warning to future generations not to make the same mistakes. It’s a message that has been written down & spoken of thousands of times…but as it appears in this book, it’s positively electr...more

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Jan 19, 2010 Stephanie guyer-stevens rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Wayfinders is a guidepost for those who want to resolve the discrepancy between the future as spelled out by a declining western empire, and that spelled out as a conservationist chart forward. LIke many anthropologists Wade is found to be reading the messages of ancient cultures as fast as he can to help chart an alternative path. It's a brilliant conversation, to compare the success of the ancient traditions at accomplishing stasis for humans on the planet with our western one, which is fa...more

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Mar 15, 2013 Gatsby rated it 5 of 5 stars

The plague of the Aborigine populations in Australia is so shattering that it made me cry...

One of the central question entrenched throughout the book is why people in Western societies can’t seem to have the same appreciation for nature as the indigenous populations he shows us. Why are many Canadians so egoistic towards the natural world, as opposed to the indigenous societies living in harmony with it, that Canadian firms would even go as far as only see profit in a beautiful land in northern...more

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Dec 24, 2009 Jacquelyn rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've followed Wade Davis for some time - not obsessively, just periodically checking in with his books or lectures to see what he's up to. This is his lecture series for CBC radio's Massey Lectures. He explores the value of other ways of seeing and knowing, concepts of time and beauty and value and meaning. His perspective is always anchored in the need to maintain the diversity of cultures, not as static antiques to be studied but as ways of life that should be permitted to evolve along their o...more

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Mar 02, 2011 Joel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Fascinating descriptions of how ancient wisdom can apply to our modern world. Highlights include the incredible navigational abilities of the Polynesians as they systematically populated disparate barren islands trough an intimate knowledge of oceanic currents and feelings about the ocean, the resourcefulness of indigenous groups in Canada's north and the Amazonian rainforest, and other south American peoples. A powerful argument for the importance of preserving cultural treasures.

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Jan 08, 2012 Justin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Well worth the read, pity there are so few people active in this field with this sensibility - which (to me) should be 'common sense'. If there were, the great strength of this book, its uniqueness, wouldn't be an issue. There's something self-promotional about Davis, some uncertainty, that makes me cautious. Although it could be told in a more polemic manner at least in some early part of the book, the message of the work is important.

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Mar 29, 2010 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

Really interesting discussion of how indigenous cultures live in harmony with the world, setting an example for those of us who live in the urbanized West. Maybe it's the Jared Diamond fan in me, but it did seem to be, perhaps, a bit over-simplified. I'm not sure if Davis chose specific cultures that are particularly successful in their environments or if he believes that all First Nation peoples would be. Very interesting in either case.

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Aug 29, 2012 Melissa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club, 2012, non-fiction

In academic and anthropological circles, the notion that there is some kind of progression or evolution from "savage" to "civilized" societies has been discredited for some time. In mainstream, popular thought - not so much. That's what's so brilliant about Davis' lectures and writings - he's asking all us laypeople to re-examine our attitudes and prejudices about indigenous peoples and their cultures. And he does it by telling stories about some of the most amazing feats of survival, knowledge,...more

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Nov 22, 2011 Bruno da Maremma rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: language, language-and-culture, indigenous-peoples

Mr. Davis gives me hope for mankind's future. In describing how other cultures interact with and see/feel the natural world he is showing real alternatives to the cartesian way of thinking that has got us in the west, and now in China, into such dire environmental straits. I only hope that there will be at least a few of these alternate cultures still active after the s..t hits the fan for us.

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About Wade Davis

Wade Davis has been described as "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life's diversity."

An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, he holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes...more Wade Davis has been described as "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life's diversity."

An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, he holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller that appeared in ten languages and was later released by Universal as a motion picture.

His other books include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990), Shadows in the Sun (1993), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), The Clouded Leopard (1998), Rainforest (1998), Light at the Edge of the World (2001), The Lost Amazon (2004), Grand Canyon (2008), Book of Peoples of the World (ed. 2008), and One River (1996), which was nominated for the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Into the Silence, an epic history of World War I and the early British efforts to summit Everest, was published in October, 2011. Sheets of Distant Rain will follow.

Davis is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2002 Lowell Thomas Medal (The Explorers Club) and the 2002 Lannan Foundation prize for literary nonfiction. In 2004 he was made an honorary member of the Explorers Club, one of just 20 in the hundred-year history of the club. In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the high Arctic of Nunavut and Greenland.

A native of British Columbia, Davis, a licensed river guide, has worked as park ranger and forestry engineer and conducted ethnographic fieldwork among several indigenous societies of northern Canada. He has published 150 scientific and popular articles on subjects ranging from Haitian vodoun and Amazonian myth and religion to the global biodiversity crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the ethnobotany of South American Indians.

Davis has written for National Geographic, Newsweek, Premiere, Outside, Omni, Harpers, Fortune, Men's Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, Natural History, Utne Reader, National Geographic Traveler, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Globe and Mail, and several other international publications.

His photographs have been featured in a number of exhibits and have been widely published, appearing in some 20 books and more than 80 magazines, journals, and newspapers. His research has been the subject of more than 700 media reports and interviews in Europe, North and South America, and the Far East, and has inspired numerous documentary films as well as three episodes of the television series The X Files.

A professional speaker for nearly 20 years, Davis has lectured at the National Geographic Society, American Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and California Academy of Sciences, as well as many other museums and some 200 universities, including Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Yale, and Stanford. He has spoken at the Aspen Institute, Bohemian Grove, Young President’s Organization, and TED Conference. His corporate clients have included Microsoft, Shell, Hallmark, Bank of Nova Scotia, MacKenzie Financials, Healthcare Association of Southern California, National Science Teachers Association, and many others.

An honorary research associate of the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, he is a fellow of the Linnean Society, the Explorers Club, and the Royal Geographical Society.

(Source: National Geographic)(less)

More about Wade Davis...

Books by Wade Davis

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest

Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire

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Quotes from The Wayfinders

“If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times.” — 11 people liked it

“Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo. ” — 9 people liked it

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The Wayfinders (CBC Massey Lecture)

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