Light at the Edge of the World Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - The Wonder of the Ethnosphere

  Chapter 2 - The Eyelids of Wolves

  Chapter 3 - The Forest and the Stars

  Chapter 4 - The Face of the Gods

  Chapter 5 - The Last Nomads

  Chapter 6 - The Land of Snows

  Chapter 7 - A Thousand Ways of Being

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  IN PRAISE OF Light at the Edge of the World

  “These dramatic photographs frequently overshadow Davis’s informative, witty essays . . . he shares anecdotes about the people he’s met, reflects on the effects of colonialism in these areas and laments the uncertain fate of groups like the Penan of Borneo and the nomads of Kenya.”

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “Light at the Edge of the World is simultaneously a celebration of human diversity, a requiem for what we have already lost, and a warning.”

  QUILL& QUIRE

  IN PRAISE OF

  The Serpent and the Rainbow

  “Exotic and far-reaching . . . a corker of a read, just the way

  Indiana Jones would tell it.”

  WALL STREET JOURNAL

  “Mr. Davis’s book should become a classic in the literature of scientific adventure. He reports his adventures brilliantly, conjuring up characters and settings vividly and creating sinister suspense with the skill of an accomplished novelist.”

  ATLANTIC MONTHLY

  IN PRAISE OF

  One River

  “This is an eloquent and complex book, filled with superb evocations of the Latin American landscape.”

  LONDON SUNDAY TIMES

  “One River is a cross between Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For sheer adventure, it puts Indiana Jones to shame.”

  VILLAGE VOICE

  IN PRAISE OF

  The Clouded Leopard

  “ In essays so sensitively written their pristine language reflects the spectacular beauty of the landscapes they describe, Davis chronicles his unusual adventures and striking observations.”

  BOOKLIST

  “His splendid cinematic prose produces a never-ending flow of vivid images . . . A wonderful read, an intriguing mélange of travelogue, personal reminiscence, information tract and old-fashioned storytelling.”

  GLOBE AND MAIL

  Preface

  THIS BOOK RECOUNTS SOME OF THE MANY JOURNEYS made over the course of my work as an ethnobotanist and anthropologist, student and writer. The initial chapters, covering travels through northern Canada, the high Andes, Amazon, Orinoco and Haiti, touch upon those seminal experiences and encounters that led me as a student to appreciate and embrace the key revelation of anthropology, the idea that distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself, morally inspired and inherently right. The latter half of the book, those sections dealing with the plight of the Penan in Borneo, the pastoral nomads of northern Kenya and the fate of Tibet, suggests something of the dark undercurrent of our age, the manner in which ancient peoples throughout the world are being torn from their past and propelled into an uncertain future. The book ends with the redemptive promise of Nunavut, the Inuit homeland recently established in the Canadian Arctic.

  Certain passages, those describing the lives of the Kogi and Ika in Colombia, and the sense of spirit and landscape that resonates in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and along the spine of the Andes, echo sentiments from my earlier books, presented here in a different form; the account of the Penan, Ariaal and Rendille first appeared in the pages of National Geographic magazine. Richard Evans Schultes will be familiar to readers of One River, and Vodoun has been the subject of two previous books and several essays.

  It is my hope that these stories provide a moving and visceral sense of the key issue celebrated by the book, the wondrous diversity and character of the ethnosphere, a notion perhaps best defined 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.

  My travels through the ethnosphere have, for the most part, been driven by simple curiosity. The mysterious formula of a folk preparation, and the thought that zombies might actually exist, first brought me to Haiti. The study of coca, a plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality, took me the length of the Andean Cordillera, a journey of well over a year. A desire to understand something of the shamanic art of healing resulted in a sojourn of many months in the Northwest Amazon. A chance to photograph the clouded leopard, rarest of all the great cats, took me to the Himalayas and the Kangshung face of Everest. The Winikina-Warao, canoe people whose feet rarely touch dry land, drew me to the Orinoco delta of Venezuela. A longing to stand in the light of the midnight sun at the mouth of the Northwest Passage and hunt narwhal with Inuit led to the high Arctic and the ice islands that haunt the memory of Europe.

  In every case, the scientific quest served as a metaphor, a lens through which to interpret a culture and acquire personal experience of the other. But what ultimately inspired these journeys was a restless desire to move, what Baudelaire called “the great malady,” horror of home. Simply put, I sought escape from a monochromatic world of monotony, in the hope that I might find in a polychromatic world of diversity the means to rediscover and celebrate the enchantment of being human.

  Acknowledgements

  IN MY TRAVELS I WAS NEVER ALONE, AND THROUGHOUT all of these adventures and investigations, I benefited enormously from the companionship and guidance of dozens of individuals. I am especially indebted to the men and women of the indigenous communities who have so generously and openly received me as a guest in their lives.

  Although it would be impossible to list by name all those who have assisted me over these many years, I would like to express my gratitude to my teachers and mentors, friends and colleagues. In particular, I would like to pay tribute to four people who have died recently: Darell Posey, tireless champion of the Kayapó and the human rights of all Amazonian peoples; Bruno Manser, friend and defender of the Penan; Terence McKenna, mystic visionary; and Richard Evans Schultes, plant explorer and teacher.

  I am also grateful to the editors and designers responsible for working with the words to create this book. Finally, I thank my family: Gail, Tara and Raina.

  I would like to dedicate this book to my sister, Karen, for her unfailingly generous love and support.

  1

  The Wonder of the Ethnosphere

  ONE NIGHT ON A RIDGE IN BORNEO, CLOSE TO dusk, with thunder over the valley and the forest alive with the electrifying roar of black cicadas, I sat by a fire with Asik Nyelit, headman of the Ubong River Penan, one of the last nomadic peoples of Southeast Asia. The rains, which had pounded the forest all afternoon, had stopped, and the light of a partial moon filtered through the branches of the canopy. Earlier in the day, Asik had killed a barking deer. Its head lay roasting in the coals.

  At one point, Asik looked up from the fire, took notice of the moon and quietly asked me if it was true that people had actually journeyed there, only to return with baskets full of dirt. If that was all they had found, why had they bothered to go? How long had it taken, and what kind of transport had they had?

  It was difficult to explain to a man who kindled fire with flint—and whose total possessions amounted to a few ragged clothes, blowpipe and quiver of poisoned darts, rattan sl
eeping mat and carrying basket, knife, axe, parang blade, loincloth, plug of tobacco, three dogs and two monkeys—a space program that had consumed the energy of nations and, at a cost of nearly a trillion dollars, placed twelve men on the moon. Or the fact that over the course of six missions, they had travelled a billion and half miles (2.4 billion km) and, indeed, brought back nothing but rocks and lunar dust, 82 8 pounds (376 kg) altogether.

  One small fragment of this precious cargo found its way to Washington, D.C., where it is today embedded in a swirl of blood-red crystal, the focal point of a beautiful stained-glass window in the National Cathedral, one of the largest and most dramatic Gothic churches in the world. When I first visited the cathedral and sat beneath its soaring vault, moved by the perfect harmony of its architecture and the shafts of light flooding the nave, I thought of Asik and his queries. The panel of glass known as the Space Window is dense with primary colours, circles of the deepest blues and reds representing the spheres of the heavens, with small crystals flaring on all sides. In the Gothic tradition, the light pouring through these windows is the Light Divine, a mystic revelation of the spirit of God. In contrast to this sacred luminosity, the tiny moon rock appears cold and lifeless, black, inert.

  Here, perhaps, was an answer to Asik’s question. The true purpose of the space journeys, or at least their most profound and lasting consequence, lay not in wealth secured but in a vision realized, a shift in perspective that would change our lives forever. The seminal moment occurred on Christmas Day, 19 6 8 , a full six months before the first lunar landing, as the crew of Apollo 8 emerged from the dark side of the moon to see rising over its surface a small and fragile blue planet, floating, as one astronaut would recall, in the velvet void of space. For the first time in history, our world was revealed: a single interactive sphere of life, a living organism composed of air, water and soil. This transcendent vision, more than any amount of scientific data, taught us that the Earth is a finite place that can endure our neglect for only so long. Inspired by this new perspective, this new hope, we began to think in new ways, a profound shift in consciousness that in the end may well prove to be the salvation of a lonely planet.

  Consider how far we have come. Forty years ago, the environmental movement was nascent. Highway beautification was a key initiative and just convincing motorists to stop throwing garbage out of car windows was considered a great victory. Writers such as Rachel Carson, who warned of far more dire scenarios, were lone voices in the wild. Gary Snyder, whose poetry touched that place of sensual memory reached later by the prophets of deep ecology, used to hitchhike across the United States simply to spend an evening with someone to whom he could relate. No one thought of the ozone layer, let alone of our capacity to destroy it and thus compromise the very conditions that make life possible. A mere decade ago, scientists who warned of the greenhouse effect were dismissed as radicals. Today, it is those who question the existence and significance of climate change who occupy the lunatic fringe. Twenty years ago, “biodiversity” and “biosphere” were exotic terms, familiar only to a small number of earth scientists and ecologists. Today, these are household words understood and appreciated by schoolchildren. The biodiversity crisis, marked by the extinction of over a million life forms in the past three decades alone, together with the associated loss of habitat, has emerged as one of the central issues of our times.

  What stands out in this checkered history is not merely the pace of attitudinal change, but its dramatic scale and character. A single generation has witnessed a shift in perspective and awareness so fundamental that to look back is to recall a world of the blind. Evidence of the impending environmental crisis swirled all around us, but we took little notice. Fortunately, we have come to see, at least partially; and though solutions to the major environmental problems remain elusive, no nation or government can ignore or deny the magnitude of the threat or the urgency of the dilemma. This alone represents a reorientation of human priorities that is both historic in its significance and profoundly hopeful in its promise.

  Acknowledging a problem, of course, is not the same as finding a solution. And having one veil lifted from our vision does not necessarily mean that we have fully recovered our sight. Even as we lament the collapse of biological diversity, we pay too little heed to a parallel process of loss, the demise of cultural diversity, the erosion of what might be termed the ethnosphere, the full complexity and complement of human potential as brought into being by culture and adaptation since the dawn of consciousness. As linguist Michael Krauss reminds us, the most pessimistic biologist would not dare suggest that half of all extant species are endangered or on the edge of extinction. Yet this, the most apocalyptic assessment of the future of biological diversity, scarcely approaches what is known to be the best conceivable scenario for the fate of the world’s languages and cultures.

  Worldwide, some 300 million people, roughly 5 per cent of the global population, still retain a strong identity as members of an indigenous culture, rooted in history and language, attached by myth and memory to a particular place on the planet. Though their populations are small, these cultures account for 60 per cent of the world’s languages and collectively represent over half of the intellectual legacy of humanity. Yet, increasingly, their voices are being silenced, their unique visions of life itself lost in a whirlwind of change and conflict.

  There is no better measure of this crisis than the loss of languages. Throughout all of human history, something in the order of ten thousand languages have existed. Today, of the roughly six thousand still spoken, fully half are not being taught to children, meaning that, effectively, they are already dead, and only three hundred are spoken by more than a million people. Only six hundred languages are considered by linguists to be stable and secure. In another century, even this number may be dramatically reduced.

  More than a cluster of words or a set of grammatical rules, a language is a flash of the human spirit, the filter through which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. A language is as divine and mysterious as a living creature. The biological analogy is apropos. Extinction, when balanced by the birth of new species, is a normal phenomenon. But the current wave of species loss due to human activities is unprecedented. Languages, like species, have always evolved. Before Latin faded from the scene, it gave rise to a score of diverse but related languages. Today, by contrast, languages are being lost at such a rate, within a generation or two, that they have no chance to leave descendants. By the same token, cultures have come and gone through time, absorbed by other more powerful societies or eliminated altogether by violence and conquest, famines, or natural disasters. But the current wave of assimilation and acculturation, in which peoples all over the Earth are being drawn away from their past, has no precedent.

  Of the more than two thousand languages in New Guinea, five hundred are each spoken by fewer than five hundred people. Of the 175 Native languages still alive in the United States, 55 are spoken by fewer than ten individuals. The words and phrases of only twenty are whispered by mothers to their babies. Of the eighty languages in California at the time of European contact, fifty remain, but not one is today spoken by a child. In Canada, there were once some sixty indigenous languages, but only four remain viable: Cree, Ojibwa, Dakota and Inuktitut. In all North America, only one Native language, Navajo, is spoken by more than a hundred thousand individuals.

  What could possibly be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last person alive capable of speaking your native tongue, to have no means of communicating and no chance of telling the world of the wonders you once knew, the wisdom and knowledge that had been passed down through generations, distilled in the sounds and words of the elders? Such is the fate, in fact, of many people; for every two weeks somewhere in the world, a language is lost. Even as you read these words, you can hear the last echoes of Kasabe in Cameroon, Pomo in California, Quinault in Washington State, Gosiutes in Utah, Ona in Patagonia and scores of oth
er languages that in the West do not even have a name.

  The vast majority of the world’s languages have yet even to be chronicled. In Papua New Guinea, only a dozen of the eight hundred languages have been studied in detail. Worldwide, perhaps as many as four thousand languages remain inadequately described. The cost of properly doing so has been estimated by linguists at $800 million, roughly the price of a single Aegis Class navy destroyer. In the United States, journalists devote columns of print to the fate of the spotted owl, but scarcely a word to the plight of the world’s languages. The United States government spends $1 million a year attempting to save a single species of wildlife, the Florida panther, but only $2 million a year for the protection of all the nation’s indigenous tongues, from the Arctic slope of Alaska to the pine barrens of Florida, from the deserts of the Navajo to the spruce forests of Maine. And yet, each language is, in itself, an entire ecosystem of ideas and intuitions, a watershed of thought, an old-growth forest of the mind. Each is a window into a world, a monument to the culture that gave it birth, and whose spirit it expresses. When we sacrifice a language, notes Ken Hale, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we might as well drop a bomb on the Louvre.

  The ultimate tragedy is not that archaic societies are disappearing but rather that vibrant, dynamic, living cultures and languages are being forced out of existence. At risk is a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination, an oral and written literature composed of the memories of countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen, midwives, poets and saints. In short, the artistic, intellectual and spiritual expression of the full complexity and diversity of the human experience.