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Wade Davis is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence (an awesome-sounding job that I kinda want) and an anthropologist. He travels worldwide, living with indigenous people and documenting their cultures. In this TED Talk from 2003, Davis talks about endangered languages and endangered cultures — cultures are being lost at an astounding rate (at least in 2003, one human language was going extinct every two weeks). Further, he shares his vision of the ethnosphere, “humanity’s great legacy” of culture, and gives fascinating examples of how it’s being lost in small pockets of dying culture around the world.
Representative quote: “every language is an Old-Growth Forest of the mind.” If the talk is too heady, just tune out and watch the National Geographic photos.
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Lovely images but I can barely stand to hear him speak. His own language is that typically flowery speech of someone with the insufferable need to romanticize everything.
10 to 1 he used to wear a béret and smoke cloves.
posted by Nate on 6-26-2009 at 3:35 pm
As an anthropology student in Ottawa I can’t resist pointing and saying:
“HEY! Its the Canadian Serpent-and-the-Rainbow Guy!!
posted by Amanda on 6-26-2009 at 5:19 pm
@Nate – agreed, he is totally flowery and kinda hard to follow as a result. I found myself spending a lot of cognitive energy wondering what he had just said — though occasionally he’d have a really interesting zinger, so it seemed worth it.
posted by Chris Higgins on 6-26-2009 at 7:02 pm
Man, I could watch TED talks all day.
posted by Jordan on 6-26-2009 at 9:40 pm
Really, Nate? As an anthropologist and a biologist, I found his talk quite stimulating. In order for the public to believe what your saying, you must say it in an assured and accurate way. It’s not “an insufferable need to romanticize everything,’ but a need to show the world what anthropologists have known for many years. Salvage ethnology won’t save humanity. Ishi and the last of every people cannot keep a culture alive or even begin to share it with outsiders. We must begin to see globalization for what it is: homogenization. We as a species must embrace cultural relativism before it is too late. Just as with our massive biological extinction rate, we cannot expect adaptability to be a magic, miracle fix; we must actively seek to stop the loss.
posted by Mandy on 6-26-2009 at 11:40 pm
I cannot see how the current shift in cultural habits is any more a “loss” of cultures than the shift in cultural habits in the past. In truth, technology and ideas have been spreading and changing cultures since time immemorial. This guy is a curator of nostalgia even as he denies it.
posted by Zach on 6-27-2009 at 12:23 pm
I believe in the need to protect endangered languages.
However, although there are at least 7,000 languages throughout the World, an increasing number are endangered through the linguistic imperialism of both Mandarin Chinese and English.
Interestingly the following declaration was made in favour of Esperanto, by UNESCO at its Paris HQ in December 2008. http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=38420&URL_DO=DO_PRINTPAGE&URL_SECTION=201.html
The commitment to the campaign to save endangered languages was made, by the World Esperanto Association at the United Nations’ Geneva HQ in September.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7vD9kChBA&feature=related or http://www.lernu.net
posted by Brian Barker on 6-27-2009 at 5:24 pm
I thought it was a brilliant talk. And, although I do have a degree in anthropology, I feel it would be accessable to a wide audience. His words, while delivered matter-of-factly, were obviously driven by a passion for preservation of endangered civilizations.
(Although, he has been a major influence in my course of study and I aspire to do what he does, so perhaps I am a bit biased.)
posted by AbenaC on 6-29-2009 at 6:57 am