The anthropologist Margaret Mead’s greatest fear was that culture would become boring. Bland. A homogeneous celebration of a Western ethos that overwhelms ethnicity and squashes imagination. It’s a theme picked up and expanded, like an aboriginal lyric, today by another anthropologist, Wade Davis.
He’s an explorer and ethnobotanist who has lived with indigenous people from the Amazon delta to the Arctic Tundra; the Tibetan plateau and the mountains of Peru, and what he concludes is that the disappearance of diverse cultures is not inevitable, that what’s at stake is not just the preservation of the Penan’s nomadic wanderings or the Warao’s canoe homes, but the vast potential of the human imagination. A journey through, and beyond, the realm of vanishing cultures.
Guests:
Wade Davis, anthropologist, ethnobotanist, National Geographic Explorer in Residence, and author of the new book “Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures.”