The Wayfinders (The CBC Massey Lectures)

by Wade Davis

the opportunity to live amongst peoples who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants.

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.

there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth.

But at the same time I don’t want it to sweep away the other voices of humanity, the other languages of the world, like some kind of cultural nerve gas.

History has not stopped, and the processes of cultural change and transformation remain as dynamic today as ever. The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. For those with the eyes to see and the heart to feel, it remains a rich and complex topography of the spirit.

understanding strange tribal peoples and cultures that they might properly be administered and controlled.

advanced societies had an obligation to assist the backward, to civilize the savage, a moral duty that again played well into the needs of empire.

It is true that the Nazis turned to pseudoscience about genetics and race to rationalize genocide, but, as Steven Pinker reminds us, the Marxist–Leninists were inspired to equally despicable and devastating acts of genocide by their pseudoscientific fantasies about the social malleability of human nature.

“The real threat to humanity,” Pinker writes, “comes from totalizing ideologies and the denial of human rights, rather than curiosity about nature and nurture.”

Western science by definition rejects a literal interpretation of origin myths that root the Haida, for example, to Haida Gwaii. But that rejection does nothing to quell the spirit of the Haida or to persuade my friend Guujaaw, head of the Council for the Haida Nation, that his people have not occupied the archipelago since human beings emerged from the clamshell and Raven slipped out of the ether to steal the sun.

Science is only one way of knowing, and its purpose is not to generate absolute truths but rather to inspire better and better ways of thinking about phenomena.

The political and technological dominance of Europeans, Coon suggested, was a natural consequence of their evolved genetic superiority. He even asserted that “racial intermixture can upset the genetic as well as the social equilibrium of a group.”

all cultures share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius.

There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success.

The sophistication of the figurative art found at Chauvet and Altamira, and at later sites such as Lascaux and Pech Merle, is astonishing not only for its transcendent beauty, but also for what it tells us about the fluorescence of human potential once brought into being by culture.

“kind of extension of human consciousness and power into the objects of greatest energy and strength they [the humans] could see in the world around them.”

the artist was somehow assimilating the “energy, the beauty, the elusive glory latent in nature to the observing mind.”

The art pays homage to that moment when human beings, through consciousness, separated themselves from the animal realm, emerging as the unique entity that we now know ourselves to be.

Proto-shamanism, the first great spiritual impulse, grew as an attempt to reconcile and even re-establish through ritual a separation that was irrevocable.

The cave art marked also the beginning of our discontent, the restless quest for meaning and understanding that has propelled the human dream ever since.

it articulated the rules that allowed a social species to thrive.

culture is the acknowledgement that each is a unique and ever-changing constellation we recognize through the observation and study of its language, religion, social and economic organization, decorative arts, stories, myths, ritual practices and beliefs, and a host of other adaptive traits and characteristics.

And no description of a people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland, the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live out their destiny. Just as landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place.

There is a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. At risk is a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination, an oral and written language composed of the memories of countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen, midwives, poets, and saints — in short, the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual expression of the full complexity and diversity of the human experience.

But they had no understanding that true wealth was found in prestige, and that status could only be conferred upon one capable of acquiring social debts and distributing surplus food to those in need, thus guaranteeing freedom from want.

For the Spaniards the most perplexing question was how such a primitive people could have accomplished so much.

the overwhelming evidence suggests that these voyages were deliberate and purposeful journeys of discovery.

That these masters were ignored was no mere oversight, but an inevitable consequence of the clash of cultures that came with conquest.

it was one thing to know what to look for, these clues and signs and indications; it was quite another to pull it altogether and confront in the moment the ever-changing power and reality of the sea.

The metaphor is that the Hokule’a never moves. It simply waits, the axis mundi of the world, as the islands rise out of the sea to greet her.

the genius of Polynesian navigation lies not in the particular but in the whole, the manner in which all of these points of information come together in the mind of the wayfinder.

“You don’t look up at the stars and know where you are,” Nainoa told me, “you need to know where you have come from by memorizing from where you sailed.”

“If you can read the ocean,” Mau once told Nainoa, “if you can see the island in your mind, you will never get lost.”

Indeed, if you took all of the genius that has allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia.

the sheer courage that true exploration implies, the brilliance of human adaptation, the dark impact of conquest and colonialism.

the need always to be skeptical about the tenacious grip of academic orthodoxy.

Knowledge is rarely completely divorced from power, and interpretation is too often an ...

the inadequacies of broad theories of culture concocted by men who never went to the field and whose ideas about human advancement were obviously skewed by preconception.

What was the nature of knowing? Who decided what was to be known?

every distinct social community, every cluster of people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet of the human legacy and its promise.

how human social perceptions are formed, and how members of distinct societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world.

Every effort should be made, he argued, to understand the perspective of the other, to learn the way they perceive the world, and if at all possible, the very nature of their thoughts.

a willingness to step back from the constraints of one’s own prejudices and preconceptions.

This notion of cultural relativism was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativ...

Anthropology merely calls for its suspension, so that the judgments we are all ethically obliged to make as human beings may be informed ones.

“I often ask myself what advantages our good society possesses over that of the ‘savages’ and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down on them… . We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We highly educated people are much worse, relatively speaking.”

“to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.”

Trobriand Islands, he discovered, were just one of many points in a trading network that linked scores of communities over thousands of square kilometres of ocean, small huddled clusters of humanity that clung to coral reefs and spread over the remains of sunken mountains.

its value grew with each voyage, with each story of hardship and wonder, witchcraft and the wind, and with the names of all the great men whose lives it had passed through.

It established relationships over great distances among peoples of different languages, facilitating the ultimate movement back and forth of utilitarian objects, pigments and dyes, stone axes, obsidian, ceramics, polished ceremonial stones, woven goods and certain foods.