It seems odd that we need to be reminded that there are many ways of knowing the world, and that all of them are valuable. I know a carpenter in Ontario who has built dozens of houses, and yet is illiterate; one of the most successful farmers in our area has never read a book except the Bible.
These are everyday examples. Wade Davis, in the 2009 Massey Lectures, now published in book form as The Wayfinders, goes further afield and presents many more striking cases of so-called primitive cultures that made mind-boggling contributions to the sum total of human knowledge, before being overrun by the juggernaut of progress.
When Davis, with a degree in anthropology and ethno-botany from Harvard, first travelled to the headwaters of the Amazon in 1975, a trip he described in One River, he saw what his education had trained him to see, “the familiar lament of anthropologists of the day,” he writes now. “Wherever we went, we encountered what we assumed to be disappearing worlds.”
The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, by Wade Davis, Anansi, 263 pages, $19.95
Returning 11 years later, however, he realized that our assumptions of the nature of Amazonian culture before European contact have been based on studying the remnants of it, that “our understanding of these ancient worlds has been for too long filtered through our experience with the marginal societies that survived what was in fact a holocaust.”
Only the remotest peoples escaped the diseases and genocide visited on the New World by the Spanish conquistadors; studying these people to gain knowledge of the entire Amazon basin before contact, he says, is as though future anthropologists were to study the Hebrides to find out what London was like before a nuclear attack. The Amazon before 1500 AD “was no empty forest,” with primitive hunter-gatherer groups practising slash-and-burn agriculture, as remote societies in the region do today. The central basin was “an artery of civilization and home to hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of human beings.”
Davis's list of cultural atrocities perpetrated in the name of technological advance is a long one
Their knowledge of how to live and prosper in one of the most forbidding forests on Earth would have been of immense value to us, but it seemed more important at the time to view the region as sparsely populated by primitive nomads, a culture that was dying out anyway.
Davis makes the same point about other cultures. The aboriginal peoples of Australia, once a million strong, now reduced to about half that, spoke 270 languages. They are the closest descendants of the first human beings to leave Africa and so represent “one of the great experiments in human thought.” But they were hunted like animals by white settlers. Today, we are losing those languages at the rate of one per year; only 18 are now spoken by more than 500 people.
Davis's list of cultural atrocities perpetrated in the name of technological advance is a long one, made all the more sobering by the examples he gives of cultural revival in certain key areas of the world, reminders of what has been lost elsewhere.
Since 1976, there has been a renaissance in Polynesia, for example, with the sailing of the Hokule'a, a re-creation of an ancient Polynesian vessel, first from Hawaii to Tahiti, a distance of 4,400 kilometres, and then from Hawaii to the Easter Islands, a voyage of 10,000 kilometres, without the aid of electronic navigational equipment or even a compass.
These amazing feats prove, among other things, that Thor Heyerdahl was completely wrong in his assumption that colonizers to Polynesia could only have come from South America. They came from New Guinea as long ago as 1500 BC, travelling fantastic distances using “wayfinders,” navigators who sensed the presence of islands by reading stars, the sea, wind, clouds and light. “One of the tragedies of history,” Davis writes, “was the failure of early Europeans … to make any effort to study and record this extraordinary repository of seafaring knowledge.”
Why does ancient wisdom matter? Because these people lived on Earth for millennia without destroying it, whereas Europeans have been “improving” the New World (having already trashed the Old) for barely 500 years, and have brought it to the edge of ecological extinction. “The entire purpose of humanity,” according to aboriginal thought, Davis writes, “is not to improve anything. It is to engage in the ritual and ceremonial activities deemed to be essential for the maintenance of the world precisely as it was at the moment of creation.”
This runs so counter to Western thought since Descartes, which sees “society … [as] a machine that could be engineered for the betterment of all,” that we have been blind to other ways of being, dismissing them as simple-minded and trivial.
It may not be too late. Revival of ancient customs and wisdom, such as has taken place in Polynesia, is also taking place among the Inuit of northern Canada, aboriginal peoples of northwest British Columbia, the dwellers of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Amazonia, and elsewhere around the world. Even among people who have lost their language, as in parts of Alaska, the culture has remained buried but alive.
Davis finds much to celebrate in these nurturings. So should we all. “By their very existence,” he writes, “the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say we cannot change, as we all know we must, the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet.”
Wayne Grady is the author of Bringing Back the Dodo: Lessons in Natural and Unnatural History. He lives near Kingston, Ont.
