Wade Davis’ “Ethnosphere” TED Talk

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference in Long Beach, California in which “the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers” (according to the TED website) are asked to give the “talk of their lives.”

TED speakers have included Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Bono, Bill Clinton, Richard Dawkins, Peter Gabriel, Stephen Hawking and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis, author of One River. (And that’s just the fairly famous folks — other speakers include circus composer Sxip Shirey and Nigeria’s first female Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.)

The YouTube video link below is to Davis’ February 2008 TED talk on what he terms the “ethnosphere,” a term he coined in his book Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanshing Cultures. From a 2003 NPR interview:

The thought was to come up with a concept that would suggest to people that just as there is a biosphere, a biological web of life, so too there is a cultural fabric that envelops the Earth, a cultural web of life. You might think of the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, intuitions and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity’s great 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.

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From Davis’ related 2002 Commonwealth Club of California talk, Vanishing Cultures, Enduring Lives:

As a young anthropologist, fresh out of college, I never understood how I was expected to turn up at some village - perhaps of the Barasana in the northwest Amazon of Colombia, a people who believe that metaphorically and mythologically they came up the Milk River from the east in sacred canoes dragged behind the bellies of the anaconda - and announce that I was there for six months. They were going to house and feed me and I was there to study their private lives; if someone did that to us, turning up on our doorstep, we’d call the police. So I early on learned to seek the proper conduit to culture: the right way or the right metaphor to break down the inherent barrier that existed by definition between myself and a people with whom I found myself living as a guest. If, for example, I wanted to live with the Barasana - a people so dependent on the forest that cognitively they do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of that forest - the obvious conduit to culture, the metaphor, was the botanical realm, and that’s why I became a plant explorer.

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My job description as the first park ranger was deliciously vague: wilderness assessment and public relations. In two four-month seasons I saw eight people. There was no one to relate publicly to, so with my horse I simply wandered. I came upon an old native grave at the headwaters of the Stikine River that said, “Love Old Man Antoine, died 1926.” Curious as to the origin of the grave, I paddled my canoe across the headwater lake chain to a hunting camp where I found this man Atehena, a Gitxsan elder whose name means “he who walks leaving no tracks.” Alex had buried the man, a legendary shaman, there in 1926. Intrigued by this link in a single generation between a living elder that I could actually speak with and an old shaman of the landscape, I quit my job as a park ranger and tried for two further seasons to pry from Alex’s memory the myths of the origin of the land.

Alex was happy to speak of survival: When the winters blew so cold the families had to decide which of the young would live and which would be abandoned to the wolves to die. But he never remembered any legends or stories until one day, by chance, one of our hunters killed a moose, took the trophy and abandoned the carcass in the bush. I put my canoe on the float of our plane, flew to the headwaters of this particular river, chased away a pack of wolves from the kill and came with 1,800 pounds of moose meat, which Alex admired when he saw me land at our shore. As we went to get the horses to drag the meat to the smokehouse to cure it for his winter supply he suddenly said, “Gee it’s a funny thing. I think I got a story for you. Come by my place tonight.” And that night I began to record 30 years of trickster/transformer tales of We-gyet, the anthropomorphic figure of folly, of Gitxsan lore. All these tales were stories of moral gratitude played out against landscape. I once asked old man Alex how long the cycle of tales was, and he said that as a child he’d ask his father the same question and to figure it out they’d snapped on snow shoes in March, a time of good ice, and begun to walk from one end of their lake to the other - 20 miles there, 20 miles back - and the story wasn’t halfway done. To measure the duration of a sacred tale, you can’t simply set a time piece; you must move through sacred geography, telling the story as you go along.

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Voodoo is most certainly not a black magic cult. If I asked you to name the great religions of the world you would say - Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity - but there’s always one continent left out: sub-Saharan Africa, the tacit assumption being that African people had no religion. By ethnographic definition they did, and all voodoo is a distillation of very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era. It became sown in the fertile soil of the new world. In many ways voodoo is a quintessentially democratic faith, because the individual not only has direct access to the divine, they actually - through the act of spirit possession, through the ritual moment invoked by the power of the song, the rhythm of the drums, the intensity of the prayer - become the god themselves. You see remarkable evidence of faith, such as people handling burning embers with impunity, an astonishing example of the mind’s ability to dominate the body that bears it, when catalyzed in a state of extreme excitation.

Transcript of Davis’ Commonwealth speech is here.