Light at the Edge of the World

by Wade Davis

  To place a value on what is being lost is impossible. The ecological and botanical knowledge of traditional peoples, to cite but one example, has obvious importance. Less than one per cent of the world’s flora has been thoroughly studied by science. Much of the fauna remains unknown. Yet a people such as the Haunóo, forest dwellers from the island of Mindoro in the Philippines, recognize more than 450 animals and distinguish 1500 plants, 400 more than are recognized by Western botanists working in the same forests. In their gardens grow 430 different cultigens. From the wild, they harvest a thousand species. Their taxonomy is as complex as that of the modern botanist, and the precision with which they observe their natural environment is, if anything, more acute.

  Such perspicacity is typical of indigenous peoples. Native memory and observation can also describe the long-term effects of ecological change, geological transformations, even the complex signs of imminent ecosystem collapse. Aborigine legends record that once it was possible to walk to the islands of the Coral Sea, to reach Tasmania by land, facts confirmed by what we now know about sea level fluctuations during the Ice Age. In the high Arctic, I once listened as a monolingual Inuit man lamented the shifts in climate that had caused the weather to become wilder and the sun hotter each year, so that for the first time the Inuit suffered from skin ailments caused, as he put it, by the sky. What he described were the symptoms and consequences of ozone depletion and global warming.

  Elsewhere in Canada, in the homeland of the Micmac, trees are named for the sound the prevailing winds make as they blow through the branches in the fall, an hour after sunset during those weeks when the weather comes always from a certain direction. Through time, the names can change, as the sounds change as the tree itself grows or decays, taking on different forms. Thus, the nomenclature of a forest over the years becomes a marker of its ecological health and can be read as a measure of environmental trends. A stand of trees that bore one name a century ago may be known today by another, a transformation that may allow ecologists, for example, to measure the impact of acid rain on the hardwood forests.

  Some botanists suggest that as many as forty thousand species of plants may have medicinal or nutritional properties, a potential that in many instances has already been realized by indigenous healers. When the Chinese denounced Tibetan medicine as feudal superstition, the number of practitioners of this ancient herb-based discipline shrank from many thousands to a mere five hundred. The cost to humanity is obvious. But how do you evaluate less concrete contributions? What is the worth of family bonds that mitigate poverty and insulate individuals from loneliness? What is the value of diverse intuitions about the cosmos, the realms of the spirit, the meaning and practice of faith? What is the economic measure of a ritual practice that results in the protection of a river or a forest?

  Answers to these questions are elusive, impossible to quantify; and as a result, too few recognize the full significance and meaning of what is being lost. Even among those sympathetic to the plight of small indigenous societies, there is a mood of resignation, as if these cultures are fated to slip away, reduced by circumstance to the sidelines of history, removed from the inexorable progression of modern life.

  Though flawed, such reasoning is perhaps to be expected, for we are all acolytes of our own realities, prisoners of our perceptions, so blindly loyal to the patterns and habits of our lives we forget that, like all human beings, we too are enveloped by the constraints and protection of culture. It is no accident that the names of so many indigenous societies—the Waorani in the forests of the Northwest Amazon, the Inuit of the Arctic, the Yanomami in the serpentine reaches of the upper Orinoco—translate simply as “the people,” the implication being that all other humans by default are non-people, savages and cannibals dwelling at the outskirts of the known world. The word “barbarian” is derived from the Greek barbarus, meaning “one who babbles,” and in the ancient world, it was applied to anyone who could not speak the language of the Greeks. Similarly, the Aztec considered all those incapable of understanding Nahuatl to be mute. Every culture is ethnocentric, fiercely loyal to its own interpretation of reality. Without such fidelity, the human imagination would run wild, and the consequences would be madness and anarchy.

  But now, equipped with a fresh perspective, inspired in part by this lens brought to us from the far expanses of space, we are empowered to think in new ways, to reach beyond prosaic restraint and thus attain new insight. To dismiss indigenous peoples as trivial, to view their societies as marginal, is to ignore and deny the central revelation of anthropology.

  In Haiti, a Vodoun priestess responds to the rhythm of drums and, taken by the spirit, handles burning embers with impunity. In the Amazonian lowlands, a Waorani hunter detects the scent of animal urine at forty paces and identifies the species that deposited it in the rain forest. In Mexico, a Mazatec farmer communicates in whistles, mimicking the intonation of his language to send complex messages across the broad valleys of his mountain homeland. It is a vocabulary based on the wind. In the deserts of northern Kenya, Rendille nomads draw blood from the faces of their camels and survive on a diet of milk and wild herbs gathered in the shade of frail acacia trees. In Borneo, children of the nomadic Penan watch for omens in the flight of crested hornbills. On an open escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadow of clouds cast upon ice.

  Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention. Our way of life, with its stunning technological wizardry, its cities dense with intrigue, is but one alternative rooted in a particular intellectual lineage. The Polynesian seafarers who sense the presence of distant atolls in the echo of waves, the Naxi shaman of Yunnan who carve mystical tales into rock, the Juwasi Bushmen who for generations lived in open truce with the lions of the Kalahari, reveal that there are other options, other means of interpreting existence, other ways of being.

  Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the common problems that confront us all. Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world but of realms of the spirit, intuitions about the meaning of the cosmos, insights into the very nature of existence.

  2

  The Eyelids of Wolves

  AS A CHILD, I WAS IMPRESSED MOSTLY BY THE cold night air, the ice cracking on the river and the lights of the Catholic seminary on the village point, where the stone windmill stood frozen by the winter. My entire world was limited to a dozen or so suburban blocks, a warren of brick houses and asphalt that sprawled over the remnants of old Québec, a rock quarry once worked by peasants, wheat fields and orchards where priests lingered on hot summer days, dirt trails that followed traplines and the paths of the coureurs de bois, the fur traders who broke open a continent. In my dreams, I wandered with them, up the St. Lawrence River to the Ottawa, past the islands of Georgian Bay to the Superior lakehead, and beyond to the far reaches of the Athabaska territory, through the lands of the Huron and Cree, Ojibway and Kaska. My waking hours were given over to more prosaic concerns: school and endless games of pickup baseball, football and hockey, the seasonal pursuits that marked the annual round for the English community of Pointe Claire.

  When, years later, I returned as an adult, what astonished me most was to realize how small my universe had been and how intimately I had known it. Every blade of grass resonated with a story. Shadows marked the ground where trees had fallen in my absence. Innovations and new construction I took as personal insults, violations of something sacred that lay at the confluence of landscape and memory. Never would I know a place so completely, embrace it with such intensity. Yet the thought of never having left, of having stayed behind as some of my old friends and neighbours had done, left me shuddering with dread. For at its core, Pointe Claire remained what it had been in my father’s time, a bedroom comm
unity of harried commuters where the English did not speak to the French, and the French looked across a deep cultural divide to a society they despised. I say this not in judgment but merely to stress how narrow were the limits of my world.

  At the age of eleven, I joined the commuters on the morning train, dressed like them in dark jacket and tie, heading into the city to the first of a series of respectable private schools that taught me too much of what I did not want to know and just enough of what I did. And that was to get away, the sooner the better. A first break occurred in the summer of 1968, when a Spanish teacher took six of us to Colombia. The teacher was English by birth, dapper in appearance, with a scent of cologne that in those days gave him the fey veneer of a dandy, an impression betrayed by the scars on his face and a glass eye that marked a body blown apart in the war. His name was John Forester.

  At fourteen, I was the youngest of his group and the most fortunate, for unlike the others who spent a sweltering season in the streets of Cali, I was billeted with a family in the mountains above the plains, at the edge of trails that reached west to the Pacific. It was a typical Colombian scene: a flock of children too numerous to keep track of, an indulgent father half the size of his wife, a wizened old grandmother who muttered to herself on a porch overlooking fields of cane and coffee, a protective sister who more than once carried her brother and me home half drunk to a mother, kind beyond words, who stood by the garden gate, hands on hips, feigning anger as she tapped her foot on the stone steps. For eight weeks, I encountered the warmth and decency of a people charged with a strange intensity, a passion for life and a quiet acceptance of the frailty of the human spirit. Several of the other Canadian students longed for home. I felt as if I had finally found it.

  Each Sunday, there were dances and wild moments when horsemen from a dozen villages raced over parched fields and along dusty roads where women offered food and teased the riders with their beauty. Though school was out for the summer, one teacher convened classes in his house and discreetly introduced themes that could not be embraced in the open: the plight of the poor, the meaning of a phrase of poetry, the fate of Che Guevara, recently killed in Bolivia. And there were darker moments: the sight of beggars, limbs swollen with disease, and armed soldiers beating ragged children, feral as alley cats, as they scattered into a black night cracked by gunfire.

  Life was real, visceral, dense with intoxicating possibilities. I learned that summer to have but one operative word in my vocabulary, and that was yes to any experience, any encounter, anything new. Colombia taught me that it was possible to fling oneself upon the benevolence of the world and emerge not only unscathed but transformed. It was a naive notion, but one that I carried with me for a long time.

  SOME YEARS LATER, after finishing high school in British Columbia, where my father had been raised, the son of a doctor in a small mining town in the Canadian Rockies, I returned east to attend university at Harvard. When the time came to select an academic major, serendipity played a hand. Faced with a dazzling array of options and with the deadline hours away, I stood on a Boston street corner in the bright light of a spring afternoon, trying to determine where my destiny lay. Earlier in the day, I had happened upon the Peabody Museum and wandered through its dusty halls, past dioramas of waxen figures dressed impeccably in the costumes of another time: Sioux warriors in full regalia, Haida women clothed in cedar bark robes, Huichol shaman enveloped in all the colours of the rainbow. With these images still swirling in my mind, I was approached on the street by another freshman, an intriguing character whom I had met just days before. When he mentioned his intention to study ethnology, my fate was somehow sealed. In the morning, I signed on as a student of social anthropology.

  Sentiment alone, however, did not prepare me for what lay ahead. Within weeks, I fell into the orbit of Professor David Maybury-Lewis, who became my tutor. A man of searing intelligence, whose formal eloquence masked a deeply humane spirit, Maybury-Lewis remains one of the great Americanists, a brilliant scholar who had lived for years among the Akwé-Xavante and Xerente Indians in central Brazil. A student of Rodney Needham at Oxford, he had come to anthropology after earning a degree at Cambridge in Romance languages. His German, Russian, Danish, Spanish and Portuguese were flawless, but it was the way he spoke English that fired the senses. His accent implied erudition. Combined with the precision of his thoughts, the effect was mesmerizing.

  Maybury-Lewis had travelled to central Brazil in the mid-1950s to investigate and, in a sense, celebrate the so-called Gê anomaly. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the first decades of the twentieth, anthropologists had maintained that technological sophistication and material well-being were a direct measure of the complexity of a culture, a convenient concept that invariably placed Victorian England at the top of a Darwinian ladder to success. Modern ethnographers rejected the notion out of hand, arguing that every human culture had, by biological definition, the same mental acuity. Whether this potential was realized through technological prowess or by the elaboration of intensely complex threads of memory inherent in a myth was a matter of cultural choice and historical circumstance. Nowhere was this modern notion more perfectly displayed than among the peoples of eastern Brazil, the complex of fierce tribes known as the Gê.

  Living in the forests of Mato Grosso and on the arid savannahs and uplands that separate the southern Amazon basin from the Atlantic coast, the Akwé-Xavante, Xerente, Kayapó, Timbira and a host of other peoples all spoke dialects of the Gê language family. Semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, they ranged across vast territories, hunting peccaries for meat, birds for brilliant plumage to be woven into ceremonial coronas that shone like the sun. Their material culture was exceedingly rudimentary. They knew nothing of canoes, though rivers dissected their lands, and as late as the 1950 s were still dependent on the bow and arrow. They cleared the savannah, but their harvests were meagre, their sparse plantings reminiscent of the dawn of agriculture.

  Yet beneath the primitive veneer lay an astonishingly rich and complex worldview, a tangle of religious beliefs and myths that informed all of life and gave rise to patterns of social organization Byzantine in their sophistication yet perfectly elegant in their elaboration. This apparent contradiction of a marginal people, technologically backward yet mentally and intellectually afire, confounded many early ethnographers. Hence, the notion of the Gê anomaly. But the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw the situation quite differently. For him, a scholar of immense vision capable of embracing all of the Americas in a single thought, the cultures of the Gê represented nothing more than a simple triumph of the human spirit and imagination.

  Having lived briefly among the Bororo, a people whose social structure was very closely related to that of the Gê tribes, Lévi-Strauss had come to see their world as a universe of oppositions: man and woman, light and darkness, good and evil, the sun and the moon, the raw and the cooked, the wild and the tame. Every facet of their society—every ritual and institution, every concept of kinship and procreation, the very cycles of life and death, the transitions of birth and initiation, even the architecture and settlement pattern of the seasonal encampments—reflected a subconscious and indeed conscious attempt to resolve in harmony these opposing elements. Thus, there were two moieties, and two exogamous patrilineages entwined by cross-cousin marriages. The men lived apart from their families, in a ceremonial structure at the centre of the enclosure. The women dwelled with the children in huts on the periphery of the encampment, at the edge of the human realm. Outside the domestic space was a ring of fields, feral and unkempt, where women birthed and husbands coupled with their wives. Beyond the clearings, the forest and savannah reached in all directions to the horizon.

  This quest for balance, Lévi-Strauss maintained, was a fundamental human urge, a key adaptive trait that allowed peoples such as the Bororo to come to terms with the fragility of their lives and the harshness of the natural world that surrounded them. At the very least,
it provided an illusion of control, that in their scattered encampments they were not utterly at the mercy of the fickle forces of life and death. Modern industrialized society has precisely the same need to insulate the individual from nature and indulges in similar illusions that it can be accomplished. The difference lies in the medium. We build machines and dwell in cities. The Gê peoples find protection in a web of ideas, beliefs and ritual practices dreamed into being at the beginning of time.

  From these insights, Lévi-Strauss elaborated a model of dualistic societies so simple and yet so all-encompassing as to almost defy belief. Clearly, it allowed for a better understanding of the Bororo. But what of the other societies of Central Brazil? It was, in part, a desire to challenge Lévi-Strauss, or at least to test his model, that in 19 57 led David Maybury-Lewis to travel up the Río das Mortes, the River of the Dead, and to fly into a remote mission adjacent to the lands of the Akwé-Xavante, at the time the most feared and warlike of all the indigenous tribes of Brazil.

  “From the air,” Professor Maybury-Lewis recalled one afternoon when we met for a tutorial in his book-lined office overlooking the courtyard of the Tozzer Library, “everything looked right.”

  Laid out before him, just as Lévi-Strauss had described, were the men’s circle and ritual shelters at the epicentre, the concentric rings of houses, fields and forest. But after months on the ground, and despite having mastered the language, Maybury-Lewis was more confused than ever. There were not two patrilineages, but three, and the marriage rules were inconsistent with the simple bilateral pattern that Lévi-Strauss had reported for the Bororo. What’s more, the bonds of kinship were crosscut by age sets.