Wade Davis is an award winning anthropologist, scientist, author, photographer, and film maker. But more than anything, Wade is an explorer. He has provided us with profound insights on culture through his living with little known indigenous societies all over the world.

Wade Davis Books:

Click to preview the books Wade Davis has penned. I intend on crushing The Wayfinders in early 2014.

Wade Davis on Culture:

Wade says, “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”

This is one of the aspects I love about traveling — meeting people and experiencing cultures that look at life through a vastly different lens.

Wade continues, “In the end, I think it’s pretty obvious at least to all of all us who’ve traveled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they’re not remote at all. They’re homelands of somebody. They represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time.”

Amen. From an outsider’s perspective (usually a Western perspective), these cultures are remote and bizarre. But to the inhabitants, this is their life. And they don’t necessarily want the changes that are sometimes imposed upon them.

On Modern Geopolitics: 

Wade says, “Genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s way of life, is not only not condemned, it’s universally, in many quarters, celebrated as a part of a development strategy.” This is a stinging indictment on developed and developing nations and their leaders as well as the consequences of global competition.

Wade goes on, “Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said, before she died, that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities.” How monotonous would life be if all indigenous cultures were to assimilate to culture of modern Western culture?

Conclusion:

Wade’s thesis is that, “This world deserves to exist in a diverse way. We can find a way to live in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being.” I agree wholeheartedly.

What are your thoughts on this discussion?