Light at the Edge of the World:
A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures
By Wade Davis
National Geographic, 180 pages, $35
When Wade Davis left his family’s home in the small Quebec suburb of Pointe Claire at age 14 to spend the summer in Colombia, he set the course for a life of cross-cultural adventures. “I learned that summer to have but one operative word in my vocabulary, and that was yes to any experience, any encounter, anything new,” Davis writes in “Light at the Edge of the World,” the first of his books to embrace his anthropological world travels and to publish his photographs in lustrous color. This openness to life, coupled with an insatiable curiosity and an acute sensitivity to the profound connection between people and place, inspired him to become an anthropologist and an ethnobotanist, a writer and a photographer.
Harvard-educated and currently explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, Davis, author of “The Serpent and the Rainbow” and “One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest,” has been traveling the world and learning from diverse peoples about their modes of being for 25 years, a quest that has infused him with a keen appreciation for the power of the imagination and the glory of the human spirit.
“[T]he key revelation of anthropology,” he writes, is “the idea that distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself, morally inspired and inherently right.” This remarkably resonant statement implies not only that every culture is of equal value, but also that each tradition has an intrinsic right to exist. If history teaches us anything it’s that cultural diversity is humanity’s natural and inevitable state, and that all attempts to declare one belief system true and all others false results in bloody confrontations, even genocide. The multicultural movement was a critical attempt to recognize and embrace cultural diversity. Now Davis pushes that imperative one giant step forward.
Over the past 30 years, he observes, our society has achieved some understanding of the connection between biological diversity and the vitality, indeed, the very viability of the biosphere. Even though we persist in eradicating wilderness regions, driving countless plant and animal species into extinction, we are at least becoming cognizant of the horrific consequences of environmental destruction and are making efforts to avert worst-case scenarios.
But we must also acknowledge that the decimation of wilderness creates “a parallel process of loss, the demise of cultural diversity.” Davis describes as indigenous people who are “rooted in history and language, attached by myth and memory to a particular place on the planet.” When the homelands of indigenous peoples are rendered uninhabitable through deforestation and various forms of “development,” all too often as the result of violent conquest and brutal exploitation, indigenous cultures–languages, spiritual knowledge and practices, and habits of being–are also demolished.
To help grasp the significance of what is being lost, Davis coins an invaluable term, the ethnosphere, which he defines as “the sum total of all thoughts, beliefs, myths, and intuitions made manifest today by the myriad cultures of the world. 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 have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species.” The death of each indigenous culture, he persuasively argues, is a tear in the ethnosphere, a diminishment of humanity’s understanding of the web of life and the meaning of existence.
To make this concept come to life, Davis describes in lyrical and illuminating prose the daily lives and rich cosmologies of such distinct cultures as the Gitxsan of northwestern British Columbia; the Andean community of Cuper in Chinchero, Peru; the Winikina-Warao of Venezuela; voodoo acolytes in Haiti; the Penan of Borneo; the Ariaal of Kenya; and the native people of Tibet. He marvels at the splendor of each culture’s unique spirituality, deep knowledge of weather, plants and animals, and creative approaches to life’s passages, family relations and community. Only about 5 percent of the global population, some 300 million people, can still be considered indigenous, yet, Davis writes, they “account for 60 percent of the world’s languages and collectively represent over half of the intellectual legacy of humanity.” And all are imperiled.
Not only does Davis weave a dazzling and provocative amount of information, commentary and personal anecdote into every exquisitely crafted page of text, his magnificent photographs capture the aura and texture of each world. His dramatic, strongly patterned landscapes explore the mystery of shadows and the radiance of sunlight; his portraits are stunningly intimate, either evincing a startling rapport with his subjects or recording their flights into the spiritual realm, as he witnesses shamans at work and worshippers in ecstasy. So arresting, eloquent and enlightening are Davis’ written and visual insights and revelations that “Light at the Edge of the World” can stand as a work as galvanizing and eye-opening as James Agee and Walker Evans’ “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” and as captivating and moving as Edward Steichen’s “The Family of Man.”
Davis carries Steichen’s universal vision forward into the globalized 21st Century, when every human, animal and plant family is in serious need of attention, respect and protection. Davis’ sublime words and images awaken wonder over the ethnosphere’s kaleidoscopic grandeur, sorrow for all who have suffered and grief over all that has been lost, and the hope that, with visionaries like Davis to guide us, we can actually learn to cherish and safeguard the precious “polychromatic world of diversity” before it’s too late.
