The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780887847660
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication date: 10/13/2009
Pages: 280
Sales rank: 127,771
Series: CBC Massey Lecture
Product dimensions: 5.00 (w) x 8.02 (h) x 0.69 (d)

Meet 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.

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Anaxagoras

Posted March 15, 2010

A must read!

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, 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"

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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