Keynote Speech: The Ethnosphere and the Academy Wade Davis Anthropologist, Ethnobotanist, Author, Photographer National Geographic Society Explorer-in-Residence
[email protected] One of the intense pleasures of travel is the opportunity to live amongst those who have not forgotten the old ways, but still feel their past in the winds, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that these people and these experiences continue to exist is to remember the central revelation of anthropology: the idea that the world into which you were born does not exist in an absolute sense but is just one model of reality—the consequence of one particular set of intellectual and adaptive choices that your own ancestors made, however successfully, many generations ago. But whether it is the Penan nomads in the forests of Borneo, the Vodoun acolytes in Haiti, or the Tibetan monks at Potola in Lhasa, all of these people teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the world. And that’s an idea that, if you think about it, can only fill you with hope. Together, the myriad cultures of the world make up an intellectual, spiritual, and social web of life that envelopes the planet and is as important to its well being as is the biological web-of-life that we know as the biosphere. You might think of this cultural web-of-life as being an ethnosphere. And you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all the thoughts, dreams, ideals, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the imagination since the dawn of consciousness.