The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (CBC Massey Lecture) [Paperback]

Wade Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 13, 2009 | Series: CBC Massey Lecture

Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? Anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world’s indigenous cultures.
In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true Lost Civilization, the people of the Anaconda. In the Andes we discover that the Earth really is alive, while in the far reaches of Australia we experience Dreamtime, the all-embracing philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa. We then travel to Nepal, where we encounter a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, who emerges from forty-five years of Buddhist retreat and solitude. And finally we settle in Borneo, where the last rainforest nomads struggle to survive.
Understanding the lessons of this journey will be our mission for the next century. For at risk is the human legacy — a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination. Rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit, as expressed by culture, is among the central challenges of our time.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

WADE DAVIS is the bestselling author of several books, including The Serpent and the Rainbow, Light at the Edge of the World, and One River. He is an award-winning anthropologist, ethnobotanist, filmmaker, and photographer. Davis currently holds the post of National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, and divides his time between Washington, D.C. and northern British Columbia.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press (October 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887847668
• ISBN-13: 978-0887847660
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #35,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

72 of 75 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read! February 18, 2010

By Charles S. Fisher

Format:Paperback

Wade Davis is right, what matters most is power, landscape and imagination. We either demean the primitive, romanticize the indigenous, or abide in a state of unbelievable ignorance of the meaning of the different ways humans have lived in this world. In his Massey Lectures, which make up this book, Davis has brought together his vast experiences of other peoples with the sheer poetry of his masterful writing to point out how much we have to learn from those whose unique understanding of the world is embedded in their means of surviving in vastly differing landscapes. It is not that people whose text-messaging-adept hands twitch while nervously fondling their cell phones are bad. But it may be that they can learn something about what it means to be human from peoples like the Australian Aborigines who lived for millennia in what we regard as a wasteland guided by Dream Time something we might only imagine in the best computer animation which does not fill one's belly except from employment in post-industrial society. And Aborigines in turn, on pain of extinction, have had to concede to our world but have miraculously managed to preserve some of their heritage, as have the indigenous of the Amazon, the Sahara, North America, and Tibet all of whom Davis tells us about.

This is a very important book. Its author brings us face to face with what we are losing when we passively accept the forcing of the whole world into the mold of our lives. It is not merely some romantic past that is represented by native resistance. As Davis mentions, the last speaker of a language must bear the tragedy of the vanishing of a whole way life with its unique relationship to landscape and community. Reading Davis, I would choose some of the human connection he describes and most certainly the intimacy with landscape that others had---an intimacy that led to adaptations fully as clever and sophisticated as any Western Civilization developed. Pull the plug on electricity and I and everything around me goes down the tubes.

The lecture that most captivated me was the one on Polynesian navigation. The book is more than worth it for this one chapter. Navigators, including women, using the most subtle indicators of stars, and seas, weather and animal life guide a raft through what to Europeans was a trackless ocean. If this is not among the most remarkable uses of the human mind I don't know what else is. It is not done with books or GPS or rational thinking as we know it. It is a keystone of cultures which have their own integrity. And Polynesians are matched by Eskimos, Andeans, desert wayfinders and many others. To lose these ways of knowing and living is to lose aspects of our humanity honed over tens of thousands of years. Wade Davis reminds us how terrible this loss is. And he is a Canadian and the Massey Lectures are the most prestigious in Canada. In the States we tend to miss the contributions of our northern neighbor. Wake up and look north! This book has much to teach us.

Charlie Fisher: emeritus professor and author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Solution to Being Human April 17, 2010

By Justin Ritchie

Format:Paperback

With the converging crises of imminent energy scarcity, environmental degradation, resource depletion and economic insolvency, suddenly I'm recognizing the apogee of our modern civilization may have passed us by a few decades ago. Being on the slope of globalization's decline as opposed to its ascent or plateau is a precarious position, mainly because the evidence increasingly indicates an ever more bleak definition of the future. But that's precisely why I found Wade Davis' 2009 CBC Massey Lectures collected in The Wayfinders so deeply inspiring. The way we define our lives and the meaning of being a human is far from an absolute and objective answer to reality, it has been the result of numerous decisions made in a compounding form over hundreds of years. Because humanity at large expresses itself in the form of modernity is largely a result of the ever growing demand our lifestyle has on ever more hard to reach raw material inputs. Although I listened to this entire series of lectures through the CBC Ideas Podcast, Davis' presentation hit me with much more gravity the second time around.

The genius and intelligence recognized by modern humanity is only in that of highly advanced technology while the genius of the cultures detailed in The Wayfinders takes many different forms. Each culture is far from trivial but an answer to the questions that come with being human, all of these answers just as impressive as our own. Our tendency is for to look at the naked and painted body of the native as a failed attempt at modernity. A native to be saved by induction into our economic system with all the benefits of employment and monetary exchange. Even until the 1960's some Australian textbooks included the Aboriginals among, "interesting animals of the country". To this point Davis quotes from the testimony of a Penan nomad to the UN General Assembly in 1992, "The (Malaysian) government says that it is bringing us development. But the only development that we see is dusty logging roads and relocation camps. For us, their so-called progress means only starvation, dependence, helplessness, the destruction of our culture and the demoralization of our people. The government says it is creating jobs for our people. Why do we need jobs? My father and grandfather did not have t o ask the government for jobs. They were never unemployed. They lived from the land and from the forest. It was a good life. We were never hungry or in need... In ten years all the jobs will be gone and the forest that has sustained us for thousands of years will be gone with them."

Davis is able to continue his discussion without resorting to the "noble savage" or the Hobbesian, "nasty, brutish and short" dichotomy. For the cultures he touches on from Australia, the Americas, Africa and Asia it is clear that a genius is required to flourish in harsh environments, against any odds we would consider possible. And all of this despite harmful environmental degradation brought about by our lifestyle. Denial of climate change is a luxury provided by a temperate environment and disconnection from the natural world. For native peoples, when the glaciers their ancestors have worshiped for generations are disappearing and the Arctic lands they've hunted annually for all of history fail to freeze but for a few months there is no ideology, only survival.

I was nearly drawn to tears by the examples of rituals and lifestyles Davis uses to illustrate the depth of beauty of human experience. The Pacific islanders sailing thousands of kilometers between beautiful islands with wind blowing through their hair to complete the Kula gift sharing ring live the lives we can only experience through fictional characters projected onto glowing rectangles. The indigenous have no sense of paid employment, of work as burden as opposed to leisure as recreation. These cultures are the definition of the human experience that we have lost and try to replace through futile substitutes. These people experience pain and suffering along with glory and triumph, but through the full spectrum of being human, as opposed to our path which fails in its attempts to shield us from the realities of death and darkness.

These cultures have disappeared rapidly over the last hundred years, entire ways of life wiped out in less than a generation. Davis wonders why we have a universal rejection of genocide yet the ubiquitous practice of ethnocide destroys more than individuals but whole solutions to the human experience. We may discredit an indigenous approach to life, but they disdain the fact that so many of our own suffer from abject poverty. A native tribesman from Malaysia when observing the homeless in Canada said, "How can homelessness exist, a poor man shames us all."

The most important lecture included in this collection was the discussion of sacred geography, of the stewardship shown by indigenous to their land. When the Spanish tore down Incan churches and monuments, building Christian churches and monasteries in their place, the native villagers celebrated because this further confirmed the sacredness of those sites. Likely not the reaction the Spanish intended. If we are to look at cultures in terms of success and failure, wouldn't the successful culture be the one that has survived for over 50,000 years in the harsh deserts of Australia as opposed to our modern world on the verge of extinction after only 300? An idea of a sacred connection to land may be dismissed as meaningless superstition, but if it does not draw from an actual spirit world, perhaps it was the technological solution created long ago to ensure our species wouldn't destroy the earth.

Davis has convinced me that when we talk about threats to our planet such as climate change or peak oil, we're really talking about the end of our globalized civilization and not the extinction of humanity. Our species can exist in many other forms that live far more meaningful lives than the "modern man". And for that reason, no matter how bleak the global situation may appear to be, the existence of the indigenous and their ability to maintain ancient wisdom despite all odds is a reason for hope.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Wayfinders January 19, 2010

By K.Griffin

Format:Paperback

The amount of research that has gone into this book is staggering! This book will change the way you see the world and your place in it. While on one hand it gives a very depressing view of our past and our motives, it also provides the perspective that can save our planet. This book should be a must read in every school around the world!