wade davis

THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

ENCUENTROS

IDB CULTURAL CENTER March 2001 No. 41

Lecture by

Wade Davis

The Light at the Edgeof the World

WADE DAVIS

IDB CULTURAL CENTER

General Coordination and Visual Arts: Félix AngelGeneral Coordination Assistance: Soledad Guerra

Concerts and Lectures: Anne VenaCultural Development in the Field Program: Elba Agusti

IDB Art Collection: Gabriela Moragas

The Cultural Center of the Inter-American Development Bank, an international finan-cial organization, was created in May 1992 at the Bank’s headquarters in Washington,D.C., as a gallery for exhibitions and a permanent forum from which to showcase out-standing expressions of the artistic and intellectual life of the Bank’s member countriesin North, Central and South America, the Caribbean region, Western Europe, Israel andJapan. Through the IDB Cultural Center, the Bank contributes to the understanding ofcultural expression as an integral element of the economic and social development of itsmember countries.

The IDB Cultural Center Exhibitions and the Concerts and Lectures Series stimulate dialogueand a greater knowledge of the culture of the Americas. The Cultural Development in theField Program funds projects in the fields of youth cultural development, institutionalsupport, restoration and conservation of cultural patrimony, and the preservation of cul-tural traditions. The IDB Art Collection, gathered over several decades, is managed by theCultural Center and reflects the relevance and importance the Bank has achieved afterfour decades as the leading financial institution concerned with the development of LatinAmerica and the Caribbean.

© Inter-American Development Bank and Wade Davis. All rights reserved.


Wade Davis


The Light at the Edge of the World was presented at the Inter-American Development Bank inWashington, D.C. on March 6, 2001 as part of the IDB Cultural Center Lectures Program.

One of the intense pleasures of travel isthe opportunity to live amongst thosewho have not forgotten the old ways, whostill feel their past in the wind, touch it instones polished by rain, and taste it in thebitter leaves of plants. To know that jag-uar shamans still journey beyond theMilky Way, or that the myths of the Inuitelders still resonate with meaning, is toremember a central revelation of anthro-pology: that the world in which we livedoes not exist in some absolute sense, butis just one model of reality, the conse-quence of a set of intellectual choices thatour lineage made, albeit successfully,many generations ago. Whether it’s thePenan in the forests of Sarawak andBorneo, or the voodoo acolytes in Haiti,or the yak herders on the flanks ofQomolangma, the goddess mother of theworld, all of these people and culturesteach us there are other ways of being,other ways of thinking, other relation-ships with the spirit realm itself. This ideacan only fill you with hope. Together these cultures make up an in-tellectual and spiritual web of life, anethnosphere, if you will, that envelops

and insulates the planet as surely as doesthe biosphere. You might think of theethnosphere as the sum total of allthoughts, dreams, ideas and intuitionsbrought into being by the human imagi-nation since the dawn of consciousness.Just as the biosphere is being severelyeroded, so too is the ethnosphere. In fact,no biologist would dare to suggest thatmore than half the known species of lifecould be on the brink of extinction. Yetthis is well known to be the most optimis-tic scenario in the realm of cultural andlinguistic diversity. The great indicator,of course, is language loss.

When each of you was born, there weresix thousand languages spoken on earth.A language isn’t just a body of vocabularyor a set of grammatical rules, it’s a flashof the human spirit; it’s a vehicle throughwhich the soul of each individual culturecomes into the material world. Of thosesix thousand languages, spoken when wewere born, fully half today are not beingtaught to schoolchildren. Today, thereremain only three hundred languagesthat are spoken by more than a millionpeople. Linguists tell us that within an-

WADE DAVIS

other century, this diversity may be con-densed to only a few hundred languages.In other words, during our period in his-tory, half of humanity’s legacy is disap-pearing before our eyes. It is importantto remember that whether a thousandpeople, a hundred thousand people, ora million people speak a language, everylanguage represents a particular intellec-tual and spiritual lineage that goes backto the dawn of time.

As a young anthropologist emergingfrom Harvard in the early 1970s, I neverunderstood how I was expected to turnup at some village—perhaps of theBarasana in the northwest Amazon ofColombia, a people who believe theycame up the river from the east, in thebelly of the sacred anaconda, or in canoesdragged by the sacred anaconda, andwere regurgitated onto the various afflu-ents of the northwest Amazon—I neverunderstood how I was expected to turnup in their village, announce that I wasthere for six months, say to the head manthat they were going to feed and houseme, and guess what, I’m here to studyyour private lives. If someone that intru-sive turned up on our doorstep, we’d callthe police. So very early on, I tried tofind a conduit to culture, the right meansor metaphor to break down the inherentbarrier that exists, by definition, betweenan outsider and a people with whom thatoutsider seeks to live as a guest.

If, for example, I wanted to learn thelife ways of the people of the northwestAmazon, I became a botanist. After all,these were a people for whom plantsmeant everything. In a world of water,silence and vegetation, some societies likethe Barasana do not cognitively distin-guish the color green from the color blue,

because the canopy of the forest isequated to the dome of the heavens them-selves. So if you want to understand theways of the people of the Anaconda, theCubeo, the Tukano, the Barasana, theMakuna, and other diverse groups ofColombia and the Amazon, plants are theobvious means of doing so.

By contrast, if you want to understandthe ways of the Inuit, a people for whomblood on ice is not a sign of death, but anaffirmation of life, the obvious conduitto culture was the hunt. Because themyths of these people are nothing moreor less than the expression of the cov-enant that exists between predator andprey, and a way for them of rationalizingthe terrible fact that to live, they had tokill the thing they love most, which arethe animals upon which they depend.

Very often in ethnography, landscapeholds the key to character. The greatwriter Lawrence Durrell once said thatyou could depopulate France and resettleit with Tartars, and within a few genera-tions, the national traits would reemerge:the affection for good food, beautifulwomen and men, a restless cynicism, areflexive anti-Americanism. Durrell wasgetting at something all travel writersunderstand: just as landscape defines apeople, so culture springs from a spiritof place. One of our great Canadian writ-ers, Margaret Atwood, said that to under-stand the essence of America, Englandand Canada, you need only three words:for America, frontier, and all that implies;for England, island, and what that im-plies; and for Canada, survival, becauseit is indeed the weight of the north thatsweeps over our imagination and definesthe essence of the national soul. Indeed,one of our great French-Canadian poets,

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Gilles Vigneault, once expressed ourmuted patriotism in these words: Mycountry is not a country, it is the winter.

I have often found that landscape iskey to character. Recently I was on as-signment in northern Kenya with groupsof nomadic people known as the Rendilleand the Ariaal. They live in the KaisutDesert, on an anvil of the sun. For thesepeople, drought is not some kind of cruelanomaly; it’s a regular feature of climate.Surviving drought is the critical impera-tive that has allowed them to become whothey are. They are herders of camel andcattle, and it behooves any individual tohave as many of those beasts as you possi-bly can, so that if there is a dire drought,at least some of your herd may survive.In order to have great numbers of ani-mals, it’s useful to have great numbers ofchildren. Having great numbers of chil-dren is an incentive for polygamy, and sothese are polygamous societies, where anelder may have as many as four or morewives to sire offspring.

Naturally, as in so much of the world,the women do all the work. But in doingall the work, they also yield the childrenthat are useful for the families and thefamily’s survival. That said, if the eldersare allowed and encouraged by theirwealth to have several wives, there is stillthe problem of what to do with the virileyoung men. This society essentially getsrid of them by dispatching them to theremote fora, encampments at the periph-ery of the community lands where ani-mals forage and where they can raid theherds of enemies. To make this separa-tion desirable, it is enveloped in prestige.The greatest moment of that young man’slife is that moment of his public circum-cision where, with his entire age set, he

sits in front of the manyatta as warm milkis poured over his body, and he stays mo-tionless as the nine cuts are made to hisforeskin in this ritual moment. If heflinches, he will not only shame his fam-ily for life, he will in fact in some cases beseverely beaten and even killed; few fail,since the honor is so grave. And so theyare sent off to the fora, the young men,the warriors, to look after the animals, liveon a diet of wild herbs and blood that isdrawn each night from the jugular of oneof the heifers, and mixed with the freshand sweet milk to make sort of a tangyand salty strawberry smoothie, which isin fact the foundation of the diet.

Of course, all this time, the warriorsare not permitted to go back into the do-mestic space, but at the same time thereis the problem of sexual desire. To miti-gate the possibility of clash between el-der and warrior, pre-marital sexual inter-course is not only allowed, but also en-couraged. Pre-marital pregnancy is se-verely tabooed, and if a young girl doesbecome pregnant, she will be forced toabort, in sometimes quite ferocious ways.The young warrior is allowed to comeback and formally beat a young girlfriend,sleep with her in the presence of her par-ents—but critically, when that young girlbecomes betrothed to an elder, all rela-tions must cease. And yet still the virileyoung man is allowed to come to the wed-ding of the young girl, and is encouragedto openly mock the virility of the old manwho has taken her away. So you begin tosee how something as simple as the im-perative of survival, the need to survivedrought, bifurcates like a crystal throughthe culture, and creates the reality of anentire people.

This idea of connecting culture and

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landscape and spirit perhaps came to mebecause I was fortunate to be raised innorthern Canada. Canada is a ratheramazing country. Few Americans realizethat you can take all the lower 48 states,fit them into Canada, and still have overtwo thousand kilometers to go beforereaching the end of our national territory.I had one of those marvelous jobs thatonly our socialist government could cre-ate. We had three million acres that thegovernment had established as a wilder-ness park, without the foggiest idea ofwhat was inside the boundaries of thatpark. I was given the job of the first parkranger in Spatsizi, a rugged knot of moun-tains in northern British Columbia. Myjob description was deliciously vague:public relations and wilderness assess-ment. In two four-month seasons, we sawsix people. There was no one to relate topublicly, and wilderness assessment was alicense to move around the park at will, ayoung man on the loose.

In the course of those ramblings, Icame upon an old native grave that justsaid, “Love Old Man Antoine, died 1926.”Intrigued by the origin of this grave atthe headwaters of the Stikine River, Ipaddled my canoe across the headwatersto a spike camp of a big game huntingoutfit. I knew that here was an old mancalled Alex Jack, whose native name inGitxsan was Atehena, “he who walks leav-ing no tracks.” Not only did Alex knowabout the gravesite, he had actually trav-eled into the country in 1926 to study withAntoine, and arrived on the day that hisfuture brother-in-law was laying the greatman to rest. Indeed, he was a great man,a legendary shaman, who divined the fu-ture in stones dropped into buckets ofwater forged out of spruce roots. In-

trigued by that connection between a liv-ing elder and of course, an ancient sha-man in a single generation, I quit my jobas a park ranger, and hired on as a hunt-ing guide, on the condition that I couldalways work with Alex.

For two further seasons, I tried to pryfrom his memory myths of the landscape.He was happy to talk of the winters, whenthe wind blew so cold that families hadto decide which of the children wouldlive, and which would be abandoned todie. He would use the word “survival”when describing the place they had lived,because survival indeed was the mainmetaphor for these people.

By chance, at the end of my tenure asa hunting guide, one of our clients killeda moose and abandoned the carcass inthe bush. I flew out with my canoe onthe float of our bush plane, landed andchased a pack of wolves away from thekill, and turned up two days later with1,500 pounds of moose meat in my ca-noe. As Alex looked at this meat, and aswe got the horses to drag the meat to thesmokehouse where we could cure it forhis winter supply, he suddenly said, “Gee,it’s a funny thing, I kind of remember,maybe I got a story, come by my placetonight.” Well, that night I began torecord 25 years of trickster/transformertales of We-gyet, the anthropomorphicfigure of folly of Gitxsan lore. All of thesestories were stories of moral gratitudeplayed out against landscape.

I once asked Alex how long the cycleof tales was, and he said it was a goodquestion. He had asked his father inMarch month, the time of good ice. Tofind out, they had slapped on their snow-shoes and begun to walk, telling the cycleof tales as they went along. As Alex re-

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called, they got all the way to the end ofthe vast lake, and all the way back, withthe story not even halfway done. In or-der to measure the duration of a myth,one had to move through sacred geogra-phy, telling the story along the way.

Alex told me also how the Catholicmissionaries came into the country andtried to evangelize his father. Being anopen-minded kind of man, he asked themissionaries what kind of animals theyhad in heaven. When the missionary saidthere are no animals in heaven, his fathercouldn’t understand. Suddenly it dawnedon the old man that heaven was a placewhere the missionaries didn’t allow ani-mals, and he turned to the priest and said,You’ve got to be out of your mind. Youare telling me I can’t carouse, I can’tgamble, I can’t mess around on mywoman, I can’t do all the things that makelife worth living, and then to go to a placewhere you don’t allow animals? You canforget it. And that was the end of that.

From that upbringing in British Co-lumbia, I was very fortunate to attendHarvard University in a rather serendipi-tous way. There I encountered, in a timeof relatively few heroes, one of the fewmen who loomed large on the Harvardcampus. A kindly professor who shotblowguns in class, and kept outside hisdoor a bucket of peyote buttons, availableas an optional laboratory experiment. Intime, mountains in South America wouldbear his name, as would national parks.Prince Phillip would call him the fatherof ethnobotany. The students knew Ri-chard Evans Schultes as the greatest liv-ing Amazonian explorer, the world’s au-thority on medicinal and hallucinogenicplants, the plant explorer who hadsparked the psychedelic era with his dis-

covery of the so-called “magic” mush-rooms in Mexico in 1938.

In 1941, having identified ololiuqui, thelong-lost Aztec sacred plant, the serpentvine, and having collected the first speci-mens of teonanacatl, the sacred flesh ofthe gods, Richard Evans Schultes took asemester’s leave of absence from Harvard.He disappeared into the forests of thenorthwest Amazon, where he remainedfor twelve years, traveling down unknownrivers, living among unknown societies,all the time enchanted with the wonderof the equatorial rainforest. In time, hewould collect more than 30,000 botani-cal specimens and 2000 medicinal plants,and describe more than 300 new species,previously unknown to science.

Schultes was an odd choice to becomea ’60s icon, because his politics were wildlyconservative. He professed not to believein the American Revolution, and he al-ways voted for Her Majesty Queen Eliza-beth II. In fact, one of his colleagues saidthat the only way for Schultes to go na-tive would be to go to England. He wouldnot use a Kennedy stamp, and insisted onusing the name Idlewild Airport. WhenJackie Onassis came to Harvard to tourthe glass flowers exhibit at our museum,Schultes, who was then the museum di-rector, disappeared. When I later wrotehis biography, a book called One River, Iconfirmed that he had hidden in the cup-board for three hours rather than guideher through the exhibits.

These kind of archaic political viewsbelie the fundamental decency of theman. In fact, between the extremes ofhis personality, in the space created bywhat appeared to be contradictions, therewas room for anyone to move. His stu-dents ranged from quietly determined

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scholars to a more eclectic group drawnto his work in the plant hallucinogens.By far his greatest protégé was a man fromPennsylvania called Timothy Plowman.The first time I saw Tim was in his base-ment office at the museum, which hadthe atmosphere of a gypsy tearoom.There were Persian carpets on the floor,patchouli and incense in the air, a beau-tiful dog, and a forest of living plants. AsI turned the corner, there was a womannaked to the waist typing furiously at amanuscript. Her name was Teza, and shewas a botanical illustrator. Later we pub-lished her illustrations of new species wehad found, and they were the only draw-ings I ever saw that captured the feel ofwind on paper.

If Timothy was in the basement, thegreat professor loomed large in thefourth floor aerie. I remember going tosee him for the first time. I walked intohis office unannounced and said, “Sir, I’mfrom British” – that’s all it took, that ad-jective – “I’m from British Columbia, I’vesaved up some money in a logging camp,and I want to go to South America likeyou did and collect plants.” He lookedacross a mound of specimens, and sim-ply said, “Well, son, when do you want togo?” Two weeks later, I was in the Ama-zon on my first trip, which lasted fifteenmonths. And that was typical of Schultes.

In all the years I studied with him, Inever had an intellectual discussion.That’s not how he taught, he taught byexample. He’d say to you things like,there’s one river you really should know,knowing full well that getting to that riverwould involve experiences such that if youemerged from the forest alive, you’d be awiser and more knowledgeable humanbeing. One of the pearls he dropped my

way before going to South America wasthat I should look up his man in Colom-bia, Tim Plowman. Schultes had securedfor Tim one of the dream academic grantsof the 1970s: a quarter million dollarsfrom the U.S. Department of Agricultureto study a plant known to the Inca as thedivine leaf of immortality, the most sacredplant of the Andes—coca, the notorioussource of cocaine.

Efforts to eradicate the coca fields havebeen underway for fifty years. However, Imust make you realize that the whole ideaof coca eradication came originally froma group of physicians in Lima, whose con-cern for the fate of the highland Indianswas matched in intensity only by their ig-norance of Andean life. They looked upin the mountains, and they saw malnutri-tion, poor sanitation, lack of literacy—and they had to find a culprit. Becauseissues of economy, land distribution andthe hierarchy of Peru cut too close to thefoundations of their own bourgeois world,they had to settle on another culprit, andthey chose coca.

The eradication of coca initially hadnothing to do with pharmacology, buteverything to do with the cultural iden-tity of those who revered the plant. Evenat the time of our grant, astonishinglylittle was known about coca. Nobodyknew how many species yielded the drug,nobody knew where the point of originwas of this most important of cultivatedplants, nobody had ever done a nutri-tional study of the plant, even though itwas something consumed every day bymillions of South American Indians.

So on a journey that was made possibleby the great professor, inspired by himand certainly infused at all times with hisspirit, Timothy and I traveled the length

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and breadth of South America. We knew,of course, that coca was the great plantof pre-Columbian America. The Inca,unable to cultivate it at the imperial capi-tal of Cusco because of the elevation, rep-licated it in gold and silver leaf in fieldsthat colored the horizon. At the time ofthe Inca, you could not approach any holyshrine if you did not have the leaf in yourmouth. If you had the leaf in your mouthat the time of your demise, your route tothe afterworld was assured. There was nogesture or moment in the Andes that wasnot mediated by an exchange of this sa-cred plant. In many places in the Andes,distances were not measured in terms ofmiles or kilometers, but in terms of cocachews. When men and women met onthe trail, they did not shake hands, theyexchanged leaves.

Even today, throughout the Andeanregion, no child can be brought into theworld, no elder can be led gently intothe realm of the dead, and no fieldplanted or harvested, without somekind of gesture towards the Apu, to-wards Pachama ma, the Earth itself.Coca is a source of illumination; thediviners can read the future on the backof the leaves, but this skill only belongsto someone who has successfully sur-vived a lightening strike.

Of course, one thing we did was thefirst nutritional study of coca, and whatwe discovered horrified our backers at theU.S. government. We found a smallamount of cocaine in it, roughly half toone percent dry weight, analogous to theamount of caffeine in a coffee bean. Noone notices the irony, at every drug abuseconference, when DEA agents bolt for thecoffee pot at 10:00 in the morning. Butto compare coca to cocaine is like com-

paring the luscious fruit of a peach withthe prussic acid found in a peach pit. Inaddition to the small amount of cocainethat is absorbed benignly through the mu-cous membrane of the mouth, a mild andvalid stimulant in a harsh and unforgiv-ing landscape, coca is chock full of vita-mins. And coca has more calcium thanany plant ever studied by the U.S. Depart-ment of Agriculture, which made it per-fect for a culture that traditionally lackeda milk product, especially for young moth-ers. It also turned out that coca has en-zymes that enhance the body’s ability todigest carbohydrates at high elevation,which made it perfect for the traditionalpotato diet of the Andes.

In one elegant scientific essay, we putin the stark profile the draconian effortsthat are still underway to eradicate thetraditional fields, with herbicides thatpollute the headwaters of the Amazon.We showed that this plant had been usedwith no evidence of toxicity, let alone ad-diction, for over four thousand years bythe pre-Columbian peoples of the Ama-zon and the Andes.

Now I mentioned at the beginning thisnotion of different ways of being; well, thisis a society that exemplifies that. The Incaand Kogi are descendants of the ancientTairona civilization that once carpetedthe Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia.In the wake of the conquest and the mad-ness that ensued, these people retreatedinto the peaks of the Sierra Nevada deSanta Marta, a vast volcanic massif thatrises to 20,000 feet from the Caribbeancoastal plain. In a bloodstained conti-nent, these people were never conquered.To this day, they remain ruled by a ritualpriesthood.

The training for the priesthood is

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rather astonishing. The young acolytesare taken away from their families at theage of two or three, sequestered in stonehuts in a world of darkness and shadowsfor eighteen years (two nine-year periodsdeliberately chosen to mimic the ninemonths of gestation they spent in theirnatural mother’s womb) so that they aremetaphorically in the womb of the greatmother. During that entire time, they areindoctrinated in the values of their soci-ety, values that maintain the propositionthat their prayers and their prayers alonemaintain the cosmic or ecological bal-ance. At the end of this arduous initia-tion, they suddenly are let out by thepriests, the mamas, and before first light,suddenly, in that crystal moment of aware-ness of their first dawn, everything theyhave learned in the abstract is affirmedin stunning glory as they see the sun riseover the flanks of the Sierra Nevada. Thepriest sort of steps back and with his bodylanguage says, you see it is as beautiful asI said, it is that wondrous, it is yours toprotect as the elder brother. They callthemselves the elder brothers; we, whothey believe have ruined the world, areknown and dismissed as the youngerbrothers. And this relationship betweenspirit, culture and landscape plays out inmarvelous ways.

I have just come back from Peru,where I took part in a remarkable ritualrace called the mujonomiento. In the com-munities and environs outside Cusco,once each year at the height of the rainyseason, the fastest young boy dresses upas a woman, and is pursued by the malepopulation that runs the boundaries ofthe community lands, which are markedby sacred places called mujones, whereprayers are uttered, coca is given to the

earth, and shouts of solidarity echo acrossthe flanks of the mountains. It is an as-tonishing feat because it’s about 25 kilo-meters in length. You begin early in themorning at 11,500 feet, you drop about1500 feet, climb 3000 feet to the summitof the sacred mountain, drop 3000 feeton the other side, climb another 3000feet, and then run on a long final stretchhome. It is done at a complete and totalrun, and you can see the waylaka, thetransvestite figure, in a photograph I tookjust four days ago in Peru, when I partici-pated in this mujonomiento. The fabu-lous thing about this is that by the end ofthe day, the runners emerge as spirit be-ings who, through ritual, have once againdefined their sense of place, their senseof belonging.

Now Schultes sent us out to the forestbecause he thought we could find newplants for the modern pharmaceuticalindustry. In a sense what we did insteadwas find a new vision of life itself, andthat’s the lesson we brought back. We didlook for new drugs, and we recognizedalways the adage of Paracelsus: that thedifference between a poison, a medicineand a narcotic is simply dosage.

So we hunted for new biodynamicplants. A plant that exemplifies this ad-age is a curious genus described bySchultes in the 1940s: Methysticodendronamenesium, or datura, sometimes knownas the tree of the evil eagle. The plantcontains a series of tropane alkaloids, in-cluding atropine, which in modest dos-age can be an efficacious treatment forasthma. The leaves also contain scopola-mine, useful to treat motion sickness. Butin excessive dosage the plant brings onan induced state of psychotic delirium,marked by visions of hellfire, a sensation

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of flight, a burning thirst, and completemadness. This, of course, is very closelyrelated to the hexing herbs of Europe,like belladonna.

Belladonna gets its name because itwas a cosmetic in the Renaissance: atro-pine dilates the pupil, and the Mona Lisahad those great eyes because shesqueezed belladonna into her eyes. Shecouldn’t see a damn thing, but she lookedbeautiful. The hexing herbs of Europeare also the origin of the notion of thewitch and the broomstick at Halloween.I’m sorry to tell you that Hallmark Cardsdid not invent that. These drugs are topi-cally active, and a very effective way for awoman to absorb them and take them inis through the moist tissue of the genita-lia; the broomstick was an applicator. Herjourney was not a literal journey throughspace; it was a hallucinatory journeythrough the landscape of her imaginationto the orgiastic assemblage of demons.That’s just a little something to lay on thePTA next October.

One of the most interesting religiouspractices I have studied in South Americais the cult of the Cactus of the Four Winds.This is an ancient healing cult that occurstoday throughout the northern coast ofPeru, but especially in the mountains andenvirons of the town of Huancabamba.What makes it interesting is the entirecomplex; acolytes come from all over SouthAmerica to be treated by the maestros.There is a nocturnal ceremony where youimbibe, through the nostril, about a literof alcohol infused with tobacco and some-times datura leaves. At night you drink aconcoction of the San Pedro cactus,Trichocereus pachanoi, which we know fromceramics and iconography has been usedin Peru for over four thousand years; it’s

full of a drug called mescaline.During the ensuing intoxication, diag-

nosis is made. But critically, treatmentcan only occur the following day, at theend of a long ritualistic pilgrimage to aseries of holy lakes called las Huaringas,which are isolated, further up in themountains. Around the periphery ofthose lakes grow the medicinal plants thatare long believed to be efficacious. Butagain, here’s the metaphor: to heal thebody, you must make some kind of physi-cal sacrifice, some kind of alignment withthe spirit realm through the use of magicplants; and then you must move throughsacred geography. Remember that theword “sacrifice” in English has as its ori-gin to make sacred. To reach the holylakes, where there is a moment of meta-morphosis, where you can be baptized forthe promise of a new dawn, then, andonly then, are you open to the pharma-cological potential of the medicinalherbs. So this is a clue to the nature ofthe shamanic art of healing, and this no-tion of different realities.

In the delta of the Orinoco River, thereis a fascinating people called the Warao,known in Venezuela as the canoe people.For most of their lives, they never touchsolid ground. They live in the delta, be-lieving that the delta is a flat plain, andto get the clay to make the fire pads, tocook their food in the huts, they must digto the bottom of their world. Among theWaraos, shamanism is highly developed.

Now in our society, shamanism is muchmisunderstood. There is this feeling fromthe New Age movement that shaman arekind of these pleasant grandfathers withfeathers and beads who are benign fig-ures. I have been with a lot of shaman,and I’ve never met one who wasn’t at least

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a little crazy; that’s their job. They arethe ones who, as Joseph Campbell said,swim in the waters the rest of us woulddrown in. They are the ones who go intothose waters, when most of us would bemuch happier to just look after our kids.What most human beings want is to houseand feed their children, protect their el-ders, and they are happy to delegate tothe shaman these curious issues of thespirit. This really accounts for the roleof these curious psychotropic plants.

Shamanism has a very different notionof the nature of health and disease. Inour society, the priest is concerned withthe domain of the spirit, and the physi-cian concerned with the physical body;but in these societies, in the role of theshaman, priests and physicians are one.The state of the spirit determines, and iscritical to, the state of the body. There-fore, diseases can be treated on two verydifferent levels: on the one hand, diseasescan be treated symptomatically, much aswe do, only with medicinal plants insteadof medicinal drugs. Critically, that notionof treatment is seen somehow as mun-dane, because to really get to the sourceof a problem, the shaman must invokesome technique of ecstasy, to soar awayon the wings of trance, get into those dis-tant metaphysical realms where they canwork their deeds of medical, magical andindeed spiritual rescue.

This accounts for the use of these cu-rious hallucinogenic plants—like ebené,the “semen of the sun,” seen in the up-per Orinoco, used by the Yanomani. Itcomes from the blood-red resin of severalspecies of the genus Virola, in the nut-meg family. It has in that resin two verypowerful tryptamines, 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethytryptamine and N,N-dimethytry-

tryptamine. To have this snuff blown upyour nose is rather like being shot out ofa rifle barrel lined with Baroque paint-ings and landing on a sea of electricity.You can hardly call it hallucinogenic, be-cause by the time you are under its influ-ence, there is no one home anymore toexperience the hallucinations; it createsnot the distortion of reality, but the dis-solution of reality. In that spiritual state,the shamans believe that they can com-mune with the hekura spirits and worktheir deeds of rescue.

Now if we slip from the Orinoco intothe eastern forests of Ecuador, we’ll go toone of the most fascinating tribes in SouthAmerica: the Waorani, who were first con-tacted peacefully in 1958. In 1957 therewas a terrible tragedy, after the missionar-ies dropped from the air 8x10 glossy pho-tographs of themselves, in what we wouldsay to be friendly postures. They forgotthat these people of the forest had neverseen anything two-dimensional in theirlives. The Waorani picked up the picturesfrom the forest floor, tried to look behindthe face to find the form for the figure,found nothing, concluded they were call-ing cards from the devil and promptlyspeared five missionaries to death.

The Waorani didn’t just spear outsid-ers, they speared each other. We tracedgenealogies back eight generations, andfound only two cases of natural death.When we pressed them on it for a mo-ment, they admitted that one of the fel-lows had died getting old, but theyspeared him anyway. Fifty-four percentof their mortality was due to them spear-ing each other. Ninety-five percent ofWaorani men had been bitten by a poi-sonous snake, fifty percent more thanonce. Yet they had a perspicacious knowl-

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edge of the forest that was astonishing.Their hunters could smell animal urineat forty paces and tell you what specieshad left it behind. They had this knowl-edge of the forest, which led them to de-velop some remarkable aspects of theirtechnology. For example, there is curare,the flying death: the poison used for thedarts is drawn from the astringent barkof the liana in several different species.Here you can see a jaguar shaman withhis hunting apparatus, and a piranha jawon his chest to launch the poison dart, toensure that the venom enters the muscleof the prey.

A fascinating thing about the Waoraniis that they had medical attention at thetime of contact, so they are one of veryfew societies in South America whosehealth status at the time of contact isknown for certain. They were an aston-ishingly healthy people, no commoncolds, no infectious diseases whatsoever,not even any secondary bacterial infec-tions. There was one woman who hadbeen speared by a hunting party as ayoung girl. The spear had gone com-pletely through her and missed any vitalorgans. They cut it off back and front,and as was their tradition, they packedthe wound with the mud of the peccary’swatering hole, hardly an antiseptic thingto do. After a little while, the tissuearound the spear point had become ne-crotic. She lifted herself from her ham-mock one day, the spear popped out as asliver would come out of our skin, andshe was back in the fields within a month.They were an astonishingly healthypeople.

And it raised a lot of interesting ques-tions about the health status of the indig-enous peoples of the Americas at the time

of contact. The word “decimate” in Latinmeant to kill one in ten. But nine out often—ninety percent of the peoples fromthe Arctic to Tierra del Fuego—werewiped out within a generation by thepathogens of Europe.

The Waorani raise other interestingethical issues. Anthropologists are some-times accused of trying to sequester in-digenous people into some kind of zoo,like some kind of biological specimen,and in fact anthropology is not aboutpreservation. It’s not change that we fear,what we fear is the inability of individualsand cultures to deal with change.Change, in fact, is one constant. Indig-enous societies only disappear when theyare overwhelmed by forces that are be-yond their capacity to adapt to. And it’snot technology alone that takes awayethnicity. A Waorani does not stop beinga Waorani when he wears sunglasses. DidAmericans stop being Americans whenthey gave up the horse and buggy andadopted the automobile? The key pointis to allow cultures to have a way to stay,to make their own choices.

In a similar sense, we romanticize in-digenous people, perhaps sometimes totheir detriment. We have this kind ofRousseauian or Thoreauvian notion ofIndian people being the first conserva-tionists. That’s absurd, because indig-enous people are neither sentimental norweakened by nostalgia. There is not a lotof room for nostalgia in the searing sunof the Sahara, or for sentimentality in theswamps of the Asmat. Indigenous peopledon’t have a notion of stewardship in theforest; they lack the technological capac-ity to impact the forest. Indigenouspeople, nevertheless, have an essentialrelationship with the Earth, which is

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based on far more subtle intuition. Theidea is that the Earth itself is breathed intobeing by human consciousness.

Now, what does that mean? It meansthat a young Runa from the mountainsof Peru, who believes that a mountain isthe abode of an apu spirit, will be a pro-foundly different human being than anAmerican kid from Montana, who be-lieves that a mountain is a pile of inertrock ready to be mined. A Kwagiulth whobelieves that the forests of British Colum-bia are the domain of Huxwhukw and theCrooked Beak of Heaven, cannibal spir-its living at the north end of the world,will be a profoundly different human be-ing than a Canadian child raised to be-lieve that a forest exists to be cut.

Anthropologists are sometimes ac-cused of trying to sequester indigenouspeople in the past. Along with that, weare also accused of embracing a kind ofextreme relativism. As if, to cite a terribleand extreme example, we could somehowrationalize the heinous acts of the Nazis—because after all, they were an ethnicgroup, they had their rules, there werestructures to those rules, and so on. Thekey point is that anthropologists in no waysuggest the abdication of judgment.What we espouse is a kind of serious rela-tivism, in which judgment is suspendeduntil understanding can be gained. Noanthropologist would rationalize heinousacts of cruel and vicious human beings.Far more often, the anthropological lenscomes into focus in those cultures thathave been misunderstood and muchmaligned in the ignorance of those mak-ing those judgments. And that brings usto the country of Haiti.

In the early 1980s, in the wake of myyears in the Amazon, I got a rather aston-

ishing assignment. My professor askedme to go to Haiti to try to find the drugsused to make zombies. At the time Ithought he himself was speaking from therealm of the phantasmagoric. But in-deed, it was an interesting and seriousassignment, because a zombie, by folkdefinition in Haiti, is the living dead. It’san individual who has been magicallybrought to his end, passed to the ground,and then somehow magically resuscitatedto face an uncertain fate, a fate invariablyinvolves some form of enslavement. Butalong with this image of the phantasma-goric was a series of reports in the popu-lar folk and academic literature, of in-stances where, at least according to oraltestimony, persons had returned to therealm of the living.

There was the case of a man calledClairvius Narcisse that really forced sci-ence to pay attention. This man was pro-nounced dead at an American-directedphilanthropic institute in 1962. Two phy-sicians witnessed his death, both Ameri-can trained, one an American—and hissister and family members were at hisbedside at the time of his demise. Yearslater, someone turned up who claimedto be this man. His case came to the at-tention of the head of the psychiatric in-stitute in Port-au-Prince, the late Dr.Lamarque Douyon, who had been inves-tigating the zombie phenomenon. Hewas working on a long series of inquiries,securing evidence, and having forensic ex-perts in Scotland Yard verify the finger-prints on the death certificates. Douyonalso had a list of questions that only some-one who knew the family background pre-sumably could answer. This man was ableto answer all those questions accurately.

Moreover, in Haiti, a zombie is a total

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pariah. Douyon figured that no soonerwould someone show up in Haiti andpretend to have been a zombie, than aleper would stand up on Hyde Park Cor-ner and flaunt their disease. All theselines of evidence led Douyon, and hiscolleague, the preeminent psycho-phar-macologist Nathan Kline, head of theRockland State Research Institution inNew York, to go public in 1982 on theBBC, saying that they had found the firstlegitimate instance of zombification.

They obviously didn’t believe in magic,so they had to believe there was a folkpreparation that could bring on a stateof apparent death so profound that itcould fool a Western-trained physician.Indeed, the Haitian government had ac-cepted the existence of this folk prepa-ration with such assurance that it was spe-cifically mentioned in the penal code ofthe country. And yet, incredibly, no onehad ever gone down, taken the people attheir word, to see if there was anythingto this. My assignment was to go down toHaiti, try to work with the traditional so-ciety, secure the formula for the prepa-ration, and try to make sense out of thissensation.

The first thing I had to do was embracein my own mind an understanding ofvoodoo. It’s interesting, if I asked you toname the great religions of the world,what would you say? Christianity, Bud-dhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, what-ever. There is always one continent leftout: sub-Saharan Africa—the tacit as-sumption being that African people hadno religion.

Well of course, by ethnographic defi-nition, they did. Voodoo has many forms.Where did we get this idea of voodoo be-ing a black magic cult? Of children bred

for the cauldron, zombies crawling outof the grave to attack people? Well, itturns out the U.S. Marine Corps occupiedHaiti twice in the 20th century, the firsttime between 1915 and 1936. Everybodyabove the rank of sergeant got a bookcontract. Those books had names likeBlack Baghdad, Cannibal Cousins, VoodooFire in Haiti, The White King of La Gonave,The Magic Island, and so on. There is aslew of these books, full of children bredfor the cauldron, pins and needles in voo-doo dolls—none of which exists, by theway. Those books gave rise to the RKOmovies of the 1940s: Night of the LivingDead, Zombies on Broadway, The White Zom-bie Slave. In any other era, these moviesand books might have been forgotten.But coming out when they did, during theera of Jim Crow, they essentially said tothe American people, any country wheresuch abominations occur, can only findits redemption through military occupa-tion. And that began the real notion wehave of voodoo being something evil.

Voodoo is not only not evil, it is thequintessentially democratic faith, becausethe believer not only has direct access tothe spirit realm, but actually receives thespirit into the body. The voodooists liketo say, you white people go to church andspeak about God; Indians eat their magicplants and speak to God; but we dance inthe temple and become God. The es-sence of voodoo is a dynamic relationshipbetween the living and the dead, wherebythe dead return to the realm of the liv-ing, and the living in time will give birthto the dead. There are 401 spirits in thevoodoo pantheon, and a proper voodoodeath is one in which the individual spiritand the body disassociate. A year and aday after the demise of the body, the voo-

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doo priest or priestess, the houngan or themambo, will ritualistically reclaim yourspirit from beneath the realm of the in-visible, from beneath the water, fromGuinée, the ancient homeland of Africa.They put that spirit into a little vessel thatis placed in the inner sanctuary of thetemple. But in time that spirit, initiallyassociated with your particular ances-tors—father, grandmother, grandfa-ther—becomes part of the vast ancestralpool of energy. Out of this pool of en-ergy emerge the archetypes, the 401 loaof the voodoo pantheon.

In this quintessentially democraticfaith, even the dead must be made toserve the living. To serve the living theymust become manifest; to become mani-fest they must return to Earth, invokedby the chants, invoked by the rhythm ofthe drums to momentarily displace a soulof the living, so that for that brief shin-ing moment, a human being becomes agod. There is a photograph taken the in-stant in which this hounsis, this acolyte,was taken by the spirit. Every spirit hasits own persona, its own personality:there’s Agwe, the goddess of the sea;Erzulie Freda, the goddess of love; andOgoun, the god of war and metallurgicalelements. You can see in this photographOgoun’s sword, the characteristic redscarf, the cornmeal vevé indicating thatthe spirit to be born is Papa Ogoun.

It’s a rather extraordinary thing to seeyour friends in this plane in one moment,and transformed in the next to the realmof the spirits. We don’t know our gods inthis direct way, and tend to have two re-sponses: either fear that finds an outletin disbelief, or awe for those of us whodon’t know our gods in this direct way.When a spirit possesses you, you are the

god, and how can a god be harmed? Soyou have these theatrical gestures, a ma-chete to the stomach, but more pro-foundly, voodoo acolytes handling burn-ing embers with impunity. They give as-tonishing examples of the ability of themind to affect the body that bears it, whencatalyzed in a state of extreme excitation.

Voodoo is not an animistic religion; itdoes not believe that rocks have spirits,but it does believe that spirits tend todwell in places of great natural beauty,and the voodooists are drawn to thoseplaces in the same spirit that we go to acathedral. We don’t go there to worshipthe building, we go there to be in thespirit of God. And here are the voodoo-ists at the sacred mud bath, a moment ofmetamorphosis, transformation, or evenmore profoundly, at this extraordinarywaterfall that I named my first book af-ter, Saut d’Eau. Water is a sacred essencein Africa, and of course, Damballah-Wedo, the serpent god of Dahomey, is arepository of all spiritual wisdom, thesource of all waters. When the first rainfell, a rainbow, Ayida-Wedo, was reflected,and Damballah fell in love with Ayida, andtheir love entwined them in a cosmic he-lix in which life was fertilized.

At this astonishing waterfall in CentralHaiti, once each year, arrive as many as20,000 acolytes dressed in white robes.They move across a limestone escarp-ment, with the motion of night clouds,as they descend on this amphitheater, il-luminated by the branches of the sacredmapou tree, which in turn is lit up by thelight of tens of thousands of candles.Merely to step behind the thin cold veilof the divine, to touch the water of thewaterfall, is to become possessed byDamballah-Wedo. At any one point in

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time you have thousands of acolytes, pos-sessed by the serpent god, slitheringacross the wet stones like snakes. Hereyou can see a man who’s gone into thewaterfall fully clothed, and allowed thesheer power of the waterfall to tear hisclothes off his body. Metaphorically, likethe snake transformed with a new skin,he will emerge for the following year, re-newed, spiritually alive, pure of heart andsolid in spirit. I think you can see fromthis photograph, from the beatific lookon this woman’s face, that this is no blackmagic cult. It’s a legitimate religiousworldview that deserves to be recognizedas such.

That said, there is sorcery in Africanfaith. To ask why there is sorcery in Afri-can faith is to ask why there is evil in theuniverse. When a disciple asked LordKrishna that, he responded, “To thickenthe plot.” Every religion has an image oflight and darkness; we have it in Chris-tianity when the fallen archangel be-comes the devil, and the Christ child isthe Son of God. Every religion makesmanifest that dichotomy and resolves itin harmony such that light wins out overdarkness, and voodoo is no different. Butin the realm of the zombie, we are nowwalking down that narrow thread woventhrough the bigger fabric of voodoo thatis indeed the world of darkness.

The zombie phenomena, if it was tohave any credibility, was going to be basedon the outcome of this pharmacologicalinvestigation. I wasn’t just looking for anydrug that can kill someone, lots of drugscan kill someone; I was looking for a drugthat could bring someone to the point ofdeath, such that they could fool a West-ern-trained physician, and still return tothe realm of the living. There are not

many drugs that indeed can do that.My first step was to work within the

Bizango Shanpwel, the secret societiesthat are the most powerful arbiters of so-cial and political life in parts of ruralHaiti. The first step in the elaboration ofthe poison is to go into the cemetery. It’simportant to note that some aspects ofvoodoo haunt us, perhaps, but we shouldagain recognize the cultural matrix.People get very upset by animal sacrifice,for example, until they realize that bloodis not blood, it’s sacred essence. It isblood that must be returned to the Earthin a healing moment. Before we judge thattoo harshly, we have to ask what it was likethe last time we took Holy Communion.

Remember that the theory of transub-stantiation empowers the Catholic priestto turn that wine into blood. When youtake the Eucharist in a Catholic Church,you are not taking a symbol of Christ,you’re drinking human blood. Every timea Catholic takes mass and takes Holy Com-munion, they participate in an endo-can-nibalistic ritual. So if you can drink bloodin a Catholic Church, I think you shouldbe able to drink chicken’s blood in a ritualmoment in Haiti. By the same token, weuse bones in our own rituals in Catholi-cism and throughout the Christianchurch, because of the metaphor of ashesto ashes and dust to dust.

Human remains are a powerful magi-cal ingredient of the preparation. A ca-daver is brought up from the dead andre-buried in the inner sanctum of thesorcerer’s temple. The so-called antidoteis prepared, but that’s essentially a sup-port for sympathetic magic. Things be-come more interesting when you look atthe critical and consistent ingredient inthe actual preparation of the so-called

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WADE DAVIS

poison itself. It turns out that the consis-tent ingredient was one of a number ofspecies of marine fish in the Tetraodonti-formes, a pantropical order that also in-cludes the famous fugu fish of Japaneseculinary delight. These fish have in theirviscera, their ovaries, on the surface oftheir skin, one of the most powerful neu-rotoxins ever discovered in nature. It’scalled tetrodotoxin. It is roughly 160,000times stronger than cocaine as an anaes-thetic, and one thousand times strongerthan sodium cyanide as a poison; a lethaldose would balance on the head of a pin.But more interesting is the way that it kills:it kills by blocking sodium channels in thenerves, bringing on peripheral paralysisand dramatically low metabolic rates, andyet consciousness is retained until themoment of death.

Because of a thousand-year-old tradi-tion in Japan, there is an enormous bio-medical literature as to exactly how thesefish kill. When I looked into that litera-ture, I found case after case after case ofindividuals nailed into their coffins bymistake. It turned out that in Japan, byfolk custom, if you succumb to the fish,you are laid out beside your grave forthree days, to make sure you are reallydead.

Suddenly this took the entire zombiething from the phantasmagoric to theplausible. It showed, without doubt, thatthe Haitian sorcerers had found a natu-ral product in their environment, con-taining a very powerful drug. A drug that,if applied in the correct dosage, could notonly make someone appear to be dead,but indeed had made people appear tobe dead many times in the past, through-out the South Pacific.

Suddenly this forced you to ask the $64

million question: who is controlling theprocess? The final phase of my Ph.D. dis-sertation was becoming a member of thesecret societies, the Bizango Shanpwel,and documenting their executive andsymbolic function. It turns out the fearin Haiti is not of zombies, as those mov-ies in the ’30s would imply, but of becom-ing a zombie. In fact, zombification is aform of social sanction invoked by thesecret societies, as a punishment for thosewho transgress rules of the traditional so-ciety. In this sense, it’s very much a mir-ror image of what we know to go on inequatorial West Africa, where secret soci-eties are the most powerful arbiters ofsocial-political life. For generations, wehave known that they use poisons to pun-ish those who transgress their rules.

This was a rather extraordinary out-come, because it allowed us to analyze thezombie phenomenon, which had beenused in an explicitly racist way to deni-grate an entire people. We turned it onits head, and showed that in fact it wasbased on a manipulation of natural prod-ucts that could only be said to be genius.It was based on a cultural matrix thatcould be understood and appreciated.There is no assembly line in Haiti mak-ing zombies, for all kinds of reasons: it isan exceedingly rare event, if indeed itoccurs at all. But the critical thing is thatits value as a social sanction depends noton how often it occurs, but that it is per-ceived to be able to occur. And this al-lows us to make sense out of sensation.

Now in one of the great ironies of mylife, the book I wrote about voodoo andHaiti became a Hollywood movie. And itbecame one of the most egregious Holly-wood movies I have ever seen. Heming-way said, if you ever decide to sell a book

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to Hollywood, just start off in Tucson,drive west to the California State line,throw the book over, and then go back toArizona and have a drink. I didn’t ex-actly go back to Arizona, but after a fewmonths’ experience with some of thesefilmmakers, I disappeared to the forestsof Borneo.

I always wanted to go to a place wetwith the innocence of birth. I wanted tolive with the nomadic people of therainforest, because at one point in humanhistory, before the Neolithic, we were allnomads, wanderers on a pristine planet.It was only with the birth of agriculture,which allowed the creation of surplus andthe rise of sedentary life, that the poetryof the shaman was turned into the proseof the organized priesthood. I alwayswanted to live with a people who werenomads in the rainforest.

The Penan live in the northern thirdof Borneo, at the head of the rivers thatflow away into the South China Sea. Therivers are the domain of the Dyak headhunters, who traditionally preyed on thePenan. The Penan themselves fled intothe hinterland they knew so well. Everyaspect of their life, through their tradi-tions and their generations, was based onmanipulation of the natural world aroundthem. From childhood to old age, theforest counted for everything. They de-pended on the forest for every single as-pect of their material well being. Theirhouses could be built in a few hours, livedin for as long as a month, depending onthe supply of the various products of theforest itself.

I wanted to live with nomads becausenomads are different. In a nomadic soci-ety, for example, there is no incentive toaccumulate material possessions, because

you have to carry everything on your back.The wealth of the society is measured notin objects, but rather in the strength ofthe relationships amongst people. Shar-ing in these societies becomes an invol-untary reflex, because you never knowwho will be the next to bring food to thetable. What does that really mean, andwhat is the lesson for all of us? In oursociety, if you pass a homeless person inthe street, you may feel poorly aboutthem, but you see them as a kind of inevi-table consequence of our economic real-ity. Whereas the Penan—and I have beenwith Penan in New York, San Franciscoand Vancouver—they turn to you and say,“Don’t you understand that a poor manshames us all?”

The Penan turned to the forest withgreat dexterity. A father uses these curi-ous plants to kill fish; the plants have tox-ins that interfere with the respiration inthe gills of the fish, and the fish can bereadily harvested by hand from the sur-face of the water. A woman makes a sleep-ing mat from the rattan pond. A hunterreturns with 150 pounds of boar meat,food that will feed the settlement for twoweeks. You can see a cornucopia of pro-duce from the forest of a people who onlyknow the ways of that forest. By knowingthe ways of the forest, they return to thatforest for signs: the flight of birds is thecursive hand of nature. These people area totally non-literate oral tradition, andwhat that means is that the total vocabu-lary of the entire language is encapsulatedin the vocabulary of the best storyteller.

As they turn to the forest for inspira-tion, they sadly today hear nothing butthe sound of machinery. In a single gen-eration, the Penan homeland has beenravaged by the most egregious example

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WADE DAVIS

of deforestation in probably the historyof the world. You hear so much aboutthe history of the Amazon being de-stroyed, but the Amazon is a vast forestthe size of the continental United States.In 1985, fully 45% of the tropical wholelog exports of hardwood came out ofMalaysia, most of it out of the east Malay-sian state of Sarawak and Sabah, andmuch of it from the homeland of thePenan. In a single generation, the Penanhave seen their homeland penetrated byroads; they’ve seen the forests cut down,and the terrible red soil appear that haspolluted their rivers. They see the for-merly crystal rivers now polluted and silt-laden, carrying half of Sarawak away tothe South China Sea, where the Japanesetankers hang light on the horizon, readyto fill their holds with raw logs rippedfrom the forests of Borneo.

You see women in settlements servingthe itinerant loggers as prostitutes and laun-dresses, women who were raised in the for-est. You see older people forcibly broughtto the settlement camps to live within struc-tures they believe are carved from the bonesof their spirits. You see a people who fi-nally, in the mid-1980s, said, “Enough!”And in what began as a kind of quixoticgesture, with blowpipes against bulldoz-ers, the Penan electrified the interna-tional environmental movement by shut-ting down logging for several months inthe entire state of Sarawak. This was theevent that led then-Senator Al Gore in hisbook, Earth in the Balance, to call thePenan the leading fighters in the struggleto save the Earth. This then gets to thedark undercurrent of this presentation.

One or two generations from now, the20th century and the early part of the 21st

century will not be remembered for wars

or technological innovations. It will beremembered as the era when we stoodby and either actively endorsed or pas-sively accepted the massive destruction ofboth the biological and cultural diversityof this planet.

It’s interesting that genocide, physicalextermination of a people, is universallycondemned. Yet ethnocide, the destruc-tion of a people’s way of life, is not onlynot condemned; in many parts of theworld, it is encouraged and advocated asappropriate policy. Wherever one goes,one sees this clash of cultures, this clashof history.

Recently I have been travelling a greatdeal in Tibet for the National GeographicSociety. Until you travel in Tibet, youdon’t really grasp the enormity of whathas happened there. I once traveled sev-eral thousand kilometers from WesternChina overland through southeasternTibet, to Lhasa and on to Katmandu, witha young Tibetan. He told me an extraor-dinary story, once we got to Lhasa andhad some privacy. His father had been aconfidant of the Pachen Lama, the sec-ond of the great religious authorities, soof course his father had been murderedimmediately by the Chinese. His unclehad fled, and his aristocratic mother wasincarcerated as a counter-revolutionary.As a young infant, he was smuggled intothe jail by his sister, who at great risk toherself managed to get him into a com-munity of women, where he spent severalmonths hidden in the skirts of his mother.His sister was then taken to a labor camp,and during the Cultural Revolution, sheinadvertently slipped on a Mao armbandthat fell off the arm of an adjacent worker.For that transgression, she was givenseven years of hard labor.

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Since the Chinese occupation of Ti-bet, over six thousand temples, monas-teries and religious structures have beendestroyed. Today, an all-out war againstthe Buddhist faith is underway. Over 1.2million Tibetans have been killed for re-ligious and cultural ideals. The amazingthing is what happened after the worstrepression of the Cultural Revolution wasrelieved, and the liberalization of the1980s began. Suddenly a people that hadbeen reduced to a homogeneous whole,people for whom the chanting of thedharma had been displaced by the chant-ing of slogans in favor of the eternal lifeof Mao Zedong, suddenly out of theground, they brought out their relics, cos-tumes, and artifacts. Suddenly, within afew years, the religious spirit had beenrevived. This indeed is the great lessonof Tibet, that they do pursue the dharma,and the dharma teaches that life is effer-vescent. The Chinese will go someday,and without doubt, the Tibetan peoplewill remain free, and return to what theyonce had.

To end this evening on a more opti-mistic note, I want to return to my owncountry of Canada and emphasize arather astonishing thing that has hap-pened. Some of you may not know thatin April of 1999, Canada gave back to theindigenous peoples, to about 26,000Inuit, administrative control of a home-land the size of Western Europe. This isa great moment of restitution for ourcountry, because we have not always beenkind to the Inuit. Indeed when the Eu-ropeans first met the Inuit, they tookthem to be savages; the Inuit took theEuropeans to be gods. Both were wrong,but one did more to honor the humanrace. What the British in particular could

not understand was that there could beno better measure of genius than the abil-ity to exist in a landscape with a technol-ogy limited to what you could carve frombones, stone, slate and small bits of woodthat floated up like flotsam from the sea,and were considered as precious as gold.

If there is one motif in the history ofthe Arctic, it is that when the Europeansmimic the ways of the Inuit, they achievedgreat feats of exploration. But when theyfailed to do so, they suffered terribledeaths. The Inuit don’t fear the cold,they take advantage of it. The runnersof their sleds were originally made fromthree Arctic char fish placed into a rowand wrapped in caribou hide, andgreased with the stomach contents of thecaribou.

I recorded a wonderful story from anelder, when I went narwhal hunting at thetip of Baffin Island. During the 1950s,there was an effort to establish Canadiansovereignty over an archipelago thatcould have gone to a European country,and we forced the Inuit into settlements.This man’s grandfather refused to go, sothe family, fearful for his life, took awayall of his tools and weapons, thinking thatwould force him into the settlements. Didit? No. In the middle of an Arctic night,with a blizzard howling outside, the oldman stepped outside of the igloo, pulleddown his caribou hide trousers and def-ecated into his hand. As the feces froze,he shaped it in the form of a knife. Hesprayed saliva along the edge to give it asharp edge, and as his shit knife tookform, he butchered a dog with it. Heskinned the dog with it, took the skin andmade a harness, took the ribcage andmade a sled, harnessed up an adjacentdog and disappeared, shit knife in belt,

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WADE DAVIS

over the ice flows. Talk about getting bywith nothing…

To my mind that is a great symbol ofhope for the indigenous people, and in-deed for the Inuit. All over the world,these people are still with us, and themiracle of our time is that they are stillwith us. In a place like California, therewere eighty languages spoken at the timeof contact. Amazingly, fifty are still withus today, but tragically, not one is beingwhispered by mothers to children. Everyview of the world that fades away, everyculture that disappears, diminishes thepossibility of life. Knowledge is lost, notonly of the natural world, but also ofrealms of the cosmos, intuitions about thespirit realm itself. This critically reducesthe human repertoire, which is our onlydefense against the common problemsthat affect us all.

If there is one lesson that I’ve dis-cerned from my travels, it is that diversityis not just the foundation of stability, asthe ecologists teach: it’s an article of faith,a fundamental indicator of the way thingsare supposed to be. If diversity is a sourceof wonder, then its opposite, this conden-sation of a blandly amorphous genericworld culture, is a source of dismay.

There is indeed a fire burning over theEarth, taking with it plants and animals,cultures, languages, ancient skills and vi-sionary wisdom. Quelling this flame andreinventing the poetry of cultural diver-sity is probably the most important chal-lenge of our times. In the end we needthe visions of these young Penan boys, justas we need the hopes of my own twoyoung girls flanking Alex Jack, theGitxsan elder I mentioned, just as weneed the memories of Alex himself. Be-cause for all of us, these myths and memo-

ries and dreams stand apart as symbolsof the naked geography of hope. Thankyou very much.

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Wade Davis (British Columbia, 1953) holds degrees in anthropology and biologyand received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Harvard. Through the Harvard Botani-cal Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer,living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations, and col-lecting over 6000 botanical specimens. He traversed the Andean Cordillera at four-teen points, and twice descended the Amazon from source to mouth. In Haiti heinvestigated folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignmentthat led to writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986),a bestseller which appeared in ten languages and was later released by Universal asa motion picture. His other books include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rainforest (1990),Nomads of the Dawn (1995), The Clouded Leopard (1998), Shadows in the Sun (1998),Rainforest (1998), and One River (1996), nominated for the Governor General’s Lit-erary Award for Nonfiction, Canada’s most prestigious literary prize. Light at theEdge of the World will be published in February 2002 by the National GeographicSociety. Most recently his work has taken him to Peru, Borneo, Tibet, the highArctic, the Orinoco delta of Venezuela and northern Kenya.

Dr. Davis has published over one hundred scientific and popular articles on sub-jects ranging from Haitian voodoo and Amazonian myth and religion to the globalbiodiversity crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the ethnobotany ofSouth American Indians. He was host and co-writer of Earthguide, a 13-part televi-sion series on the environment that aired on the Discovery Channel. Since 1994 hehas served as Vice President for Ethnobotany and Conservation at Andes Pharma-ceuticals, and is on the boards of several NGOs dedicated to conservation-baseddevelopment and the protection of cultural and biological diversity. In 2000 he wasappointed to a three-year term as Explorer-in-Residence at the National GeographicSociety.

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WADE DAVIS

Other publications available in the Encuentros series:

Houses, Voices and Language in Latin AmericaDialogue with José Donoso, Chilean novelist.No. 1, March 1993.

How the History of America BeganLecture by Germán Arciniegas, Colombian historian.No. 2, April 1993.

The International Year of Indigenous PeoplesLecture by Rigoberta Menchú, Guatemalan indigenous leaderand 1992 Novel Peace Prize laureate.No. 3, October 1993.

Contemporary Paraguayan Narrative: Two CurrentsLecture by Renée Ferrer, Paraguayan novelist and poet.No. 4, March 1994.

Paraguay and Its Plastic ArtsLecture by Annick Sanjurjo Casciero, Paraguayan historian.No. 5, March 1994.

The Future of DramaLecture by Alfonso Sastre, Spanish playwright.No. 6, April 1994.

Dance: from Folk to ClassicalLecture by Edward Villella, North American dancer and ArtisticDirector of the Miami City Ballet.No. 7, August 1994.

Belize: A Literary PerspectiveLecture by Zee Edgell, Belizean novelist and author of Beka Lamb.No. 8, September 1994.

The Development of Sculpture in the Quito SchoolLecture by Magdalena Gallegos de Donoso, Ecuadorian anthropologist.No. 9, October 1994.


Art in Context: Aesthetics, Environment, and Function in the Arts of JapanLecture by Ann Yonemura, North American curator of Japanese Artat the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution.No. 10, March 1995.

Approaching the End of the MillenniumLecture by Homero Aridjis, Mexican poet and winner ofthe United Nations Global 500 Award.No. 11, September 1995.

Haiti: A Bi-Cultural ExperienceLecture by Edwidge Danticat, Haitian novelist and author of Breath, Eyes, Memory.No. 12, December 1995.

The Meanings of the MillenniumLecture by Bernard McGinn, North American theologian fromthe University of Chicago’s Divinity School.No. 13, January 1996.

Andean Millenarian Movements: Their Origins, Originalityand Achievements (16th-18th centuries).Lecture by Manuel Burga, Peruvian sociologist fromthe Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.No. 14, February 1996.

Apocalypse in the Andes: Contact Zones and the Struggle for Interpretive PowerLecture by Mary Louise Pratt, Canadian linguist from Stanford University.No. 15, March 1996.

When Strangers Come to Town: Millennial Discourse, Comparison,and the Return of Quetzalcoatl.Lecture by David Carrasco, North American historianfrom Princeton University.No. 16, June 1996.

Understanding Messianism in Brazil: Notes from a Social AnthropologistLecture by Roberto Da Matta, Brazilian anthropologist fromNotre Dame University.No. 17, September 1996.

WADE DAVIS

The People’s Millennium: The Legacy of Juan and Eva Perón Lecture by Juan E. Corradi, Argentine sociologist from New York University. No. 18, November 1996.

Brief Notes on Ecuadorian and U.S. LiteratureLecture by Raúl Pérez Torres, Ecuadorian Poet.No. 19, March 1997.

Society and Poetry: Those Who Come Wrapped in a BlanketLecture by Roberto Sosa, Honduran poet.No. 20, May 1997.

Architecture as a Living ProcessLecture by Douglas Cardinal, Canadian architect whose projectsinclude Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of the American Indian.No. 21, July 1997.

Composing Opera: A Backstage Visit to the Composer’s WorkshopLecture by Daniel Catán, Mexican composer whose operas includeFlorencia en el Amazonas.No. 22, August 1997.

Welcoming Each Other: Cultural Transformation of the Caribbean in the 21st Century.Lecture by Earl Lovelace, Trinidadian novelist and winner ofthe 1997 Commonwealth Prize.No. 23, January 1998.

Out of SilenceLecture by Albalucía Angel, Colombian novelist and pioneerof Latin American postmodernism.No. 24, April 1998.

How Latino Immigration is Transforming AmericaLecture by Roberto Suro, North American reporter for The Washington Post,and former Bureau Chief of The New York Times in Houston, Texas.No. 25, May 1998.

The Iconography of Painted Ceramics from the Northern Andes.Lecture by Felipe Cárdenas-Arroyo, Colombian archaeologist fromthe University of Los Andes in Bogota.No. 26, July 1998.


Celebrating the Extraordinary Life of Elisabeth SamsonLecture by Cynthia McLeod, Surinamese novelist and authorof The High Price of Sugar.No. 27, August 1998.

A Country, A DecadeLecture by Salvador Garmendia, Venezuelan novelist, and winnerof the Juan Rulfo Short Story Prize and the National Literature Prize.No. 28, September 1998.

Aspects of Creation in the Central American NovelLecture by Gloria Guardia, Panamanian fiction writer and essayist,and senior member of the Panamanian Academy of Language.No. 29, September 1998.

Made in GuyanaLecture by Fred D’Aguiar, Guyanese novelist and winner of theWhitbread First Novel Award, and the Guyana Prize for Fiction, and Poetry.No. 30, November 1998.

True Lies on the Subject of Literary CreationLecture by Sergio Ramírez, Nicaraguan writer and former Vice-president of hiscountry.No. 31, May 1999.

Myth, History and Fiction in Latin AmericaLecture by Tomás Eloy Martínez, Argentine writer and author of Santa Evita.No. 32, May 1999.

Cultural Foundations of Latin American IntegrationLecture by Leopoldo Castedo, Spanish-Chilean art historian.No. 33, September 1999.

El Salvador and the Construction of Cultural IdentityLecture by Miguel Huezo Mixco, Salvadorian poet and journalist.No. 34, October 1999.

WADE DAVIS

The Female Memory in NarrativeLecture by Nélida Piñon, Brazilian novelist and author of The Republic of Dreams.No. 35, November 1999.

Le Grand Tango: The Life and Music of Astor PiazzollaLecture by María Susana Azzi, Argentine cultural anthropologist, and member ofthe board of the National Academy of Tango in Buenos Aires.No. 36, May 2000.

Columbus’s Ghost: Tourism, Art and National Identity in the BahamasLecture by Ian Gregory Strachan, English Professor at the University ofMassachusetts at Dartmouth, and author of God’s Angry Babies.No. 37, June 2000.

Talkin’ Ol’ Story: A Brief Survey of the Oral Tradition of the BahamasLecture by Patricia Glinton-Meicholas, founding president of the BahamasAssociation for Cultural Studies and recipient of a Silver Jubilee ofIndependence Medal for Literature.No. 38, July 2000.

Anonymous Sources: A Talk on Translators and TranslationLecture by Eliot Weinberger, essayist and translator of many booksby Octavio Paz, and winner of the PEN/Kolovakos Award forpromoting Hispanic literature in the United States.No. 39, November 2000.

Bringing the Rainbow into the House: Multiculturalism in CanadaLecture by Roch Carrier, director of the Canada Council for the Arts from 1994-97,and became Canada’s fourth National Librarian in 1999.No. 40, February 2001.

The Light at the Edge of the WorldLecture by Wade Davis, Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Societyand author of The Serpent and the Rainbow and One River.No. 41, March 2001.


__________________________________________________________ Spanish and English versions available

The Encuentros series is distributed free of charge to university and municipal librariesthroughout the IDB member countries. Interested institutions may obtain the series bycontacting the IDB Cultural Center at the address listed on the back cover.

Chestnut Women: French Caribbean Women Writers and SingersLecture by Brenda F. Berrian, Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and author ofThat’s the Way It Is: African American Women in the New South Africa.No. 42, July 2001.

WADE DAVIS

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