WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.000 You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel 00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:05.000 and one of the delights of ethnographic research 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:07.000 is the opportunity to live amongst those 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:09.000 who have not forgotten the old ways, 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:12.000 who still feel their past in the wind, 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:15.000 touch it in stones polished by rain, 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:17.000 taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:21.000 Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way, 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:25.000 or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:27.000 or that in the Himalaya, 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:32.000 the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma, 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:35.000 is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology, 00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:37.000 and that is the idea that the world in which we live 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:40.000 does not exist in some absolute sense, 00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:41.000 but is just one model of reality, 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:45.000 the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:49.000 that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:54.000 And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives. 00:00:54.000 --> 00:00:56.000 We're all born. We all bring our children into the world. 00:00:56.000 --> 00:00:58.000 We go through initiation rites. 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:00.000 We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death, 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:04.000 so it shouldn't surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:06.000 we all have art. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:09.000 But what's interesting is the unique cadence of the song, 00:01:09.000 --> 00:01:11.000 the rhythm of the dance in every culture. 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:14.000 And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo, 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:17.000 or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti, 00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:22.000 or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya, 00:01:24.000 --> 00:01:26.000 the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes, 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:32.000 or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara -- 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:34.000 this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with 00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:35.000 a month ago -- 00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:38.000 or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma, 00:01:38.000 --> 00:01:40.000 Everest, the goddess mother of the world. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:43.000 All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being, 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:44.000 other ways of thinking, 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:46.000 other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth. 00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:48.000 And this is an idea, if you think about it, 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:50.000 can only fill you with hope. 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:53.000 Now, together the myriad cultures of the world 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:57.000 make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life 00:01:57.000 --> 00:01:59.000 that envelops the planet, 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:01.000 and is as important to the well-being of the planet 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:04.000 as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:07.000 And you might think of this cultural web of life 00:02:07.000 --> 00:02:08.000 as being an ethnosphere, 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:10.000 and you might define the ethnosphere 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:13.000 as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, 00:02:13.000 --> 00:02:16.000 ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:20.000 by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. 00:02:20.000 --> 00:02:23.000 The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy. 00:02:23.000 --> 00:02:25.000 It's the symbol of all that we are 00:02:25.000 --> 00:02:29.000 and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:30.000 --> 00:02:33.000 And just as the biosphere has been severely eroded, 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:35.000 so too is the ethnosphere 00:02:35.000 --> 00:02:37.000 -- and, if anything, at a far greater rate. 00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:39.000 No biologists, for example, would dare suggest 00:02:39.000 --> 00:02:42.000 that 50 percent of all species or more have been or are 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:44.000 on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true, 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:46.000 and yet that -- the most apocalyptic scenario 00:02:46.000 --> 00:02:49.000 in the realm of biological diversity -- 00:02:49.000 --> 00:02:52.000 scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario 00:02:52.000 --> 00:02:54.000 in the realm of cultural diversity. 00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:57.000 And the great indicator of that, of course, is language loss. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:57.000 --> 00:03:00.000 When each of you in this room were born, 00:03:00.000 --> 00:03:03.000 there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. 00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:06.000 Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary 00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:08.000 or a set of grammatical rules. 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:10.000 A language is a flash of the human spirit. 00:03:10.000 --> 00:03:13.000 It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture 00:03:13.000 --> 00:03:14.000 comes into the material world. 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:17.000 Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, 00:03:17.000 --> 00:03:21.000 a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:25.000 And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey, 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:29.000 fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children. 00:03:29.000 --> 00:03:32.000 They're no longer being taught to babies, 00:03:32.000 --> 00:03:34.000 which means, effectively, unless something changes, 00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:35.000 they're already dead. 00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:39.000 What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, 00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:41.000 to be the last of your people to speak your language, 00:03:41.000 --> 00:03:44.000 to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors 00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:47.000 or anticipate the promise of the children? 00:03:47.000 --> 00:03:50.000 And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody 00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:52.000 somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks, 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:54.000 because every two weeks, some elder dies 00:03:54.000 --> 00:03:56.000 and carries with him into the grave the last syllables 00:03:56.000 --> 00:03:58.000 of an ancient tongue. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:00.000 And I know there's some of you who say, "Well, wouldn't it be better, 00:04:00.000 --> 00:04:01.000 wouldn't the world be a better place 00:04:01.000 --> 00:04:04.000 if we all just spoke one language?" And I say, "Great, 00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:07.000 let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese. 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:08.000 Let's make it Kogi." 00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:10.000 And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:13.000 to be unable to speak your own language. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:13.000 --> 00:04:16.000 And so, what I'd like to do with you today 00:04:16.000 --> 00:04:20.000 is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere, 00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:22.000 a brief journey through the ethnosphere, 00:04:22.000 --> 00:04:26.000 to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost. 00:04:27.000 --> 00:04:34.000 Now, there are many of us who sort of forget 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:36.000 that when I say "different ways of being," 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:38.000 I really do mean different ways of being. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:44.000 Take, for example, this child of a Barasana in the Northwest Amazon, 00:04:44.000 --> 00:04:45.000 the people of the anaconda 00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:47.000 who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river 00:04:47.000 --> 00:04:50.000 from the east in the belly of sacred snakes. 00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:53.000 Now, this is a people who cognitively 00:04:53.000 --> 00:04:55.000 do not distinguish the color blue from the color green 00:04:55.000 --> 00:04:57.000 because the canopy of the heavens 00:04:57.000 --> 00:04:58.000 is equated to the canopy of the forest 00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:00.000 upon which the people depend. 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:03.000 They have a curious language and marriage rule 00:05:03.000 --> 00:05:05.000 which is called "linguistic exogamy:" 00:05:05.000 --> 00:05:08.000 you must marry someone who speaks a different language. 00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:10.000 And this is all rooted in the mythological past, 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:12.000 yet the curious thing is in these long houses, 00:05:12.000 --> 00:05:14.000 where there are six or seven languages spoken 00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:16.000 because of intermarriage, 00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:19.000 you never hear anyone practicing a language. 00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:22.000 They simply listen and then begin to speak. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:24.000 Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I ever lived with, 00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:28.000 the Waorani of northeastern Ecuador, 00:05:28.000 --> 00:05:31.000 an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958. 00:05:31.000 --> 00:05:35.000 In 1957, five missionaries attempted contact 00:05:35.000 --> 00:05:36.000 and made a critical mistake. 00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:37.000 They dropped from the air 00:05:37.000 --> 00:05:39.000 8 x 10 glossy photographs of themselves 00:05:39.000 --> 00:05:41.000 in what we would say to be friendly gestures, 00:05:41.000 --> 00:05:43.000 forgetting that these people of the rainforest 00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:46.000 had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives. 00:05:46.000 --> 00:05:48.000 They picked up these photographs from the forest floor, 00:05:48.000 --> 00:05:51.000 tried to look behind the face to find the form or the figure, 00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:53.000 found nothing, and concluded that these were calling cards 00:05:53.000 --> 00:05:56.000 from the devil, so they speared the five missionaries to death. 00:05:57.000 --> 00:05:59.000 But the Waorani didn't just spear outsiders. 00:05:59.000 --> 00:06:00.000 They speared each other. 00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:03.000 54 percent of their mortality was due to them spearing each other. 00:06:03.000 --> 00:06:06.000 We traced genealogies back eight generations, 00:06:06.000 --> 00:06:08.000 and we found two instances of natural death 00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:10.000 and when we pressured the people a little bit about it, 00:06:10.000 --> 00:06:12.000 they admitted that one of the fellows had gotten so old 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:16.000 that he died getting old, so we speared him anyway. (Laughter) 00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:19.000 But at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge 00:06:19.000 --> 00:06:20.000 of the forest that was astonishing. 00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:23.000 Their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces 00:06:23.000 --> 00:06:26.000 and tell you what species left it behind. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:26.000 --> 00:06:28.000 In the early '80s, I had a really astonishing assignment 00:06:28.000 --> 00:06:30.000 when I was asked by my professor at Harvard 00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:32.000 if I was interested in going down to Haiti, 00:06:33.000 --> 00:06:35.000 infiltrating the secret societies 00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:37.000 which were the foundation of Duvalier's strength 00:06:37.000 --> 00:06:38.000 and Tonton Macoutes, 00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:41.000 and securing the poison used to make zombies. 00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:44.000 In order to make sense out of sensation, of course, 00:06:44.000 --> 00:06:47.000 I had to understand something about this remarkable faith 00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:50.000 of Vodoun. And Voodoo is not a black magic cult. 00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:53.000 On the contrary, it's a complex metaphysical worldview. 00:06:53.000 --> 00:06:54.000 It's interesting. 00:06:54.000 --> 00:06:55.000 If I asked you to name the great religions of the world, 00:06:55.000 --> 00:06:56.000 what would you say? 00:06:56.000 --> 00:06:59.000 Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:01.000 There's always one continent left out, 00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:03.000 the assumption being that sub-Saharan Africa 00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:05.000 had no religious beliefs. Well, of course, they did 00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:07.000 and Voodoo is simply the distillation 00:07:08.000 --> 00:07:09.000 of these very profound religious ideas 00:07:09.000 --> 00:07:12.000 that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era. 00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:14.000 But, what makes Voodoo so interesting 00:07:14.000 --> 00:07:16.000 is that it's this living relationship 00:07:16.000 --> 00:07:17.000 between the living and the dead. 00:07:17.000 --> 00:07:18.000 So, the living give birth to the spirits. 00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:21.000 The spirits can be invoked from beneath the Great Water, 00:07:21.000 --> 00:07:23.000 responding to the rhythm of the dance 00:07:23.000 --> 00:07:25.000 to momentarily displace the soul of the living, 00:07:25.000 --> 00:07:29.000 so that for that brief shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god. 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:31.000 That's why the Voodooists like to say 00:07:31.000 --> 00:07:34.000 that "You white people go to church and speak about God. 00:07:34.000 --> 00:07:36.000 We dance in the temple and become God." 00:07:36.000 --> 00:07:39.000 And because you are possessed, you are taken by the spirit -- 00:07:39.000 --> 00:07:40.000 how can you be harmed? 00:07:40.000 --> 00:07:43.000 So you see these astonishing demonstrations: 00:07:43.000 --> 00:07:45.000 Voodoo acolytes in a state of trance 00:07:45.000 --> 00:07:48.000 handling burning embers with impunity, 00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:51.000 a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind 00:07:51.000 --> 00:07:52.000 to affect the body that bears it 00:07:52.000 --> 00:07:55.000 when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:56.000 --> 00:07:58.000 Now, of all the peoples that I've ever been with, 00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:00.000 the most extraordinary are the Kogi 00:08:00.000 --> 00:08:03.000 of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. 00:08:03.000 --> 00:08:06.000 Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization 00:08:06.000 --> 00:08:09.000 which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia, 00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:10.000 in the wake of the conquest, 00:08:10.000 --> 00:08:13.000 these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif 00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:15.000 that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain. 00:08:15.000 --> 00:08:17.000 In a bloodstained continent, 00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:20.000 these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish. 00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:23.000 To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood 00:08:23.000 --> 00:08:25.000 but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary. 00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:28.000 The young acolytes are taken away from their families 00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:30.000 at the age of three and four, 00:08:30.000 --> 00:08:32.000 sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness 00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:36.000 in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years: 00:08:36.000 --> 00:08:37.000 two nine-year periods 00:08:37.000 --> 00:08:40.000 deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation 00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:42.000 they spend in their natural mother's womb; 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:45.000 now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. 00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:46.000 And for this entire time, 00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:50.000 they are inculturated into the values of their society, 00:08:50.000 --> 00:08:52.000 values that maintain the proposition that their prayers 00:08:52.000 --> 00:08:55.000 and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic -- 00:08:55.000 --> 00:08:57.000 or we might say the ecological -- balance. 00:08:58.000 --> 00:08:59.000 And at the end of this amazing initiation, 00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:01.000 one day they're suddenly taken out 00:09:01.000 --> 00:09:04.000 and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18, 00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:08.000 they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness 00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:11.000 of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes 00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:12.000 of the stunningly beautiful landscape, 00:09:13.000 --> 00:09:15.000 suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract 00:09:15.000 --> 00:09:18.000 is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back 00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:20.000 and says, "You see? It's really as I've told you. 00:09:20.000 --> 00:09:23.000 It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect." 00:09:23.000 --> 00:09:25.000 They call themselves the "elder brothers" 00:09:25.000 --> 00:09:28.000 and they say we, who are the younger brothers, 00:09:28.000 --> 00:09:31.000 are the ones responsible for destroying the world. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:32.000 --> 00:09:34.000 Now, this level of intuition becomes very important. 00:09:34.000 --> 00:09:36.000 Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape, 00:09:36.000 --> 00:09:38.000 we either invoke Rousseau 00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:41.000 and the old canard of the "noble savage," 00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:43.000 which is an idea racist in its simplicity, 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:46.000 or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau 00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:48.000 and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are. 00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:50.000 Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental 00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:52.000 nor weakened by nostalgia. 00:09:52.000 --> 00:09:54.000 There's not a lot of room for either 00:09:54.000 --> 00:09:56.000 in the malarial swamps of the Asmat 00:09:56.000 --> 00:09:59.000 or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, 00:09:59.000 --> 00:10:03.000 through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth 00:10:03.000 --> 00:10:06.000 that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, 00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:08.000 but on a far subtler intuition: 00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:11.000 the idea that the Earth itself can only exist 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:14.000 because it is breathed into being by human consciousness. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:16.000 Now, what does that mean? 00:10:16.000 --> 00:10:18.000 It means that a young kid from the Andes 00:10:18.000 --> 00:10:20.000 who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit 00:10:20.000 --> 00:10:22.000 that will direct his or her destiny 00:10:22.000 --> 00:10:25.000 will be a profoundly different human being 00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:28.000 and have a different relationship to that resource 00:10:28.000 --> 00:10:30.000 or that place than a young kid from Montana 00:10:30.000 --> 00:10:33.000 raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock 00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:34.000 ready to be mined. 00:10:34.000 --> 00:10:38.000 Whether it's the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant. 00:10:38.000 --> 00:10:41.000 What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship 00:10:41.000 --> 00:10:43.000 between the individual and the natural world. 00:10:43.000 --> 00:10:45.000 I was raised in the forests of British Columbia 00:10:45.000 --> 00:10:47.000 to believe those forests existed to be cut. 00:10:47.000 --> 00:10:49.000 That made me a different human being 00:10:49.000 --> 00:10:51.000 than my friends amongst the Kwagiulth 00:10:51.000 --> 00:10:53.000 who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw 00:10:53.000 --> 00:10:54.000 and the Crooked Beak of Heaven 00:10:54.000 --> 00:10:57.000 and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, 00:10:57.000 --> 00:11:01.000 spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:03.000 Now, if you begin to look at the idea 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:05.000 that these cultures could create different realities, 00:11:05.000 --> 00:11:06.000 you could begin to understand 00:11:06.000 --> 00:11:11.000 some of their extraordinary discoveries. Take this plant here. 00:11:11.000 --> 00:11:13.000 It's a photograph I took in the Northwest Amazon just last April. 00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:16.000 This is ayahuasca, which many of you have heard about, 00:11:16.000 --> 00:11:19.000 the most powerful psychoactive preparation 00:11:19.000 --> 00:11:21.000 of the shaman's repertoire. 00:11:21.000 --> 00:11:23.000 What makes ayahuasca fascinating 00:11:23.000 --> 00:11:27.000 is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation, 00:11:27.000 --> 00:11:31.000 but the elaboration of it. It's made really of two different sources: 00:11:31.000 --> 00:11:33.000 on the one hand, this woody liana 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:35.000 which has in it a series of beta-carbolines, 00:11:35.000 --> 00:11:38.000 harmine, harmaline, mildly hallucinogenic -- 00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:40.000 to take the vine alone 00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:42.000 is rather to have sort of blue hazy smoke 00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:44.000 drift across your consciousness -- 00:11:44.000 --> 00:11:47.000 but it's mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family 00:11:47.000 --> 00:11:49.000 called Psychotria viridis. 00:11:49.000 --> 00:11:52.000 This plant had in it some very powerful tryptamines, 00:11:52.000 --> 00:11:56.000 very close to brain serotonin, dimethyltryptamine, 00:11:56.000 --> 00:11:57.000 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine. 00:11:57.000 --> 00:11:59.000 If you've ever seen the Yanomami 00:11:59.000 --> 00:12:01.000 blowing that snuff up their noses, 00:12:01.000 --> 00:12:04.000 that substance they make from a different set of species 00:12:04.000 --> 00:12:08.000 also contains methoxydimethyltryptamine. 00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:10.000 To have that powder blown up your nose 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:14.000 is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel 00:12:14.000 --> 00:12:21.000 lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity. (Laughter) 00:12:21.000 --> 00:12:23.000 It doesn't create the distortion of reality; 00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:24.000 it creates the dissolution of reality. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:27.000 In fact, I used to argue with my professor, Richard Evan Shultes -- 00:12:27.000 --> 00:12:29.000 who is a man who sparked the psychedelic era 00:12:29.000 --> 00:12:31.000 with his discovery of the magic mushrooms 00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:33.000 in Mexico in the 1930s -- 00:12:33.000 --> 00:12:35.000 I used to argue that you couldn't classify these tryptamines 00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:38.000 as hallucinogenic because by the time you're under the effects 00:12:38.000 --> 00:12:42.000 there's no one home anymore to experience a hallucination. (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:12:42.000 --> 00:12:45.000 But the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally 00:12:45.000 --> 00:12:47.000 because they're denatured by an enzyme 00:12:47.000 --> 00:12:50.000 found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase. 00:12:50.000 --> 00:12:53.000 They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction 00:12:53.000 --> 00:12:56.000 with some other chemical that denatures the MAO. 00:12:56.000 --> 00:12:57.000 Now, the fascinating things 00:12:57.000 --> 00:13:01.000 are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana 00:13:01.000 --> 00:13:04.000 are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary 00:13:05.000 --> 00:13:08.000 to potentiate the tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question. 00:13:08.000 --> 00:13:12.000 How, in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants, 00:13:12.000 --> 00:13:16.000 do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants 00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:17.000 that when combined in this way, 00:13:17.000 --> 00:13:19.000 created a kind of biochemical version 00:13:19.000 --> 00:13:21.000 of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts? NOTE Paragraph 00:13:21.000 --> 00:13:24.000 Well, we use that great euphemism, "trial and error," 00:13:24.000 --> 00:13:25.000 which is exposed to be meaningless. 00:13:26.000 --> 00:13:29.000 But you ask the Indians, and they say, "The plants talk to us." NOTE Paragraph 00:13:29.000 --> 00:13:30.000 Well, what does that mean? 00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:34.000 This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca, 00:13:34.000 --> 00:13:37.000 all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest, 00:13:38.000 --> 00:13:42.000 all of which are referable to our eye as one species. 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:44.000 And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy 00:13:44.000 --> 00:13:47.000 and they say, "I thought you knew something about plants. 00:13:47.000 --> 00:13:49.000 I mean, don't you know anything?" And I said, "No." 00:13:49.000 --> 00:13:52.000 Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties 00:13:52.000 --> 00:13:55.000 in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key. 00:13:55.000 --> 00:13:57.000 Now, that's not going to get you a Ph.D. at Harvard, 00:13:57.000 --> 00:14:01.000 but it's a lot more interesting than counting stamens. (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:14:01.000 --> 00:14:02.000 Now -- 00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:05.000 (Applause) -- 00:14:05.000 --> 00:14:07.000 the problem -- the problem is that even those of us 00:14:07.000 --> 00:14:09.000 sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people 00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:10.000 view them as quaint and colorful 00:14:10.000 --> 00:14:12.000 but somehow reduced to the margins of history 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:15.000 as the real world, meaning our world, moves on. 00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:17.000 Well, the truth is the 20th century, 300 years from now, 00:14:17.000 --> 00:14:20.000 is not going to be remembered for its wars 00:14:20.000 --> 00:14:21.000 or its technological innovations, 00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:23.000 but rather as the era in which we stood by 00:14:24.000 --> 00:14:26.000 and either actively endorsed or passively accepted 00:14:26.000 --> 00:14:29.000 the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity 00:14:29.000 --> 00:14:32.000 on the planet. Now, the problem isn't change. 00:14:32.000 --> 00:14:34.000 All cultures through all time 00:14:34.000 --> 00:14:37.000 have constantly been engaged in a dance 00:14:37.000 --> 00:14:38.000 with new possibilities of life. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:39.000 --> 00:14:41.000 And the problem is not technology itself. 00:14:42.000 --> 00:14:44.000 The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux 00:14:44.000 --> 00:14:45.000 when they gave up the bow and arrow 00:14:45.000 --> 00:14:47.000 any more than an American stopped being an American 00:14:47.000 --> 00:14:49.000 when he gave up the horse and buggy. 00:14:49.000 --> 00:14:50.000 It's not change or technology 00:14:50.000 --> 00:14:54.000 that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power, 00:14:54.000 --> 00:14:56.000 the crude face of domination. 00:14:56.000 --> 00:14:58.000 Wherever you look around the world, 00:14:58.000 --> 00:15:01.000 you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away; 00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:03.000 these are dynamic living peoples 00:15:03.000 --> 00:15:06.000 being driven out of existence by identifiable forces 00:15:06.000 --> 00:15:08.000 that are beyond their capacity to adapt to: 00:15:08.000 --> 00:15:10.000 whether it's the egregious deforestation 00:15:11.000 --> 00:15:13.000 in the homeland of the Penan -- 00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:16.000 a nomadic people from Southeast Asia, from Sarawak -- 00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:20.000 a people who lived free in the forest until a generation ago, 00:15:20.000 --> 00:15:23.000 and now have all been reduced to servitude and prostitution 00:15:23.000 --> 00:15:25.000 on the banks of the rivers, 00:15:25.000 --> 00:15:29.000 where you can see the river itself is soiled with the silt 00:15:29.000 --> 00:15:31.000 that seems to be carrying half of Borneo away 00:15:31.000 --> 00:15:32.000 to the South China Sea, 00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:34.000 where the Japanese freighters hang light in the horizon 00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:38.000 ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forest -- 00:15:38.000 --> 00:15:39.000 or, in the case of the Yanomami, 00:15:39.000 --> 00:15:41.000 it's the disease entities that have come in, 00:15:41.000 --> 00:15:43.000 in the wake of the discovery of gold. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:43.000 --> 00:15:45.000 Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet, 00:15:45.000 --> 00:15:47.000 where I'm doing a lot of research recently, 00:15:48.000 --> 00:15:51.000 you'll see it's a crude face of political domination. 00:15:51.000 --> 00:15:53.000 You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people 00:15:53.000 --> 00:15:55.000 is universally condemned, but ethnocide, 00:15:56.000 --> 00:15:59.000 the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, 00:15:59.000 --> 00:16:02.000 it's universally, in many quarters, celebrated 00:16:02.000 --> 00:16:04.000 as part of a development strategy. 00:16:04.000 --> 00:16:07.000 And you cannot understand the pain of Tibet 00:16:07.000 --> 00:16:09.000 until you move through it at the ground level. 00:16:09.000 --> 00:16:13.000 I once travelled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in Western China 00:16:13.000 --> 00:16:16.000 overland through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa 00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:20.000 with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa 00:16:20.000 --> 00:16:23.000 that I understood the face behind the statistics 00:16:23.000 --> 00:16:24.000 you hear about: 00:16:24.000 --> 00:16:28.000 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes, 00:16:28.000 --> 00:16:31.000 1.2 million people killed by the cadres 00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:32.000 during the Cultural Revolution. 00:16:33.000 --> 00:16:35.000 This young man's father had been ascribed to the Panchen Lama. 00:16:35.000 --> 00:16:37.000 That meant he was instantly killed 00:16:37.000 --> 00:16:39.000 at the time of the Chinese invasion. 00:16:39.000 --> 00:16:41.000 His uncle fled with His Holiness in the Diaspora 00:16:41.000 --> 00:16:44.000 that took the people to Nepal. 00:16:44.000 --> 00:16:46.000 His mother was incarcerated 00:16:46.000 --> 00:16:48.000 for the crime of being wealthy. 00:16:49.000 --> 00:16:51.000 He was smuggled into the jail at the age of two 00:16:51.000 --> 00:16:53.000 to hide beneath her skirt tails 00:16:53.000 --> 00:16:55.000 because she couldn't bear to be without him. 00:16:55.000 --> 00:16:57.000 The sister who had done that brave deed 00:16:57.000 --> 00:16:58.000 was put into an education camp. 00:16:58.000 --> 00:17:00.000 One day she inadvertently stepped on an armband 00:17:01.000 --> 00:17:03.000 of Mao, and for that transgression, 00:17:03.000 --> 00:17:06.000 she was given seven years of hard labor. 00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:09.000 The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear, 00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:12.000 but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:13.000 --> 00:17:16.000 And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice: 00:17:16.000 --> 00:17:19.000 do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony 00:17:19.000 --> 00:17:22.000 or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? 00:17:22.000 --> 00:17:25.000 Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said, before she died, 00:17:25.000 --> 00:17:28.000 that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards 00:17:28.000 --> 00:17:30.000 this blandly amorphous generic world view 00:17:30.000 --> 00:17:35.000 not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination 00:17:35.000 --> 00:17:39.000 reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, 00:17:39.000 --> 00:17:40.000 but that we would wake from a dream one day 00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:43.000 having forgotten there were even other possibilities. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:44.000 --> 00:17:47.000 And it's humbling to remember that our species has, perhaps, 00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:49.000 been around for [150,000] years. 00:17:49.000 --> 00:17:52.000 The Neolithic Revolution -- which gave us agriculture, 00:17:52.000 --> 00:17:54.000 at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed; 00:17:54.000 --> 00:17:56.000 the poetry of the shaman was displaced 00:17:56.000 --> 00:17:57.000 by the prose of the priesthood; 00:17:57.000 --> 00:18:00.000 we created hierarchy specialization surplus -- 00:18:00.000 --> 00:18:02.000 is only 10,000 years ago. 00:18:02.000 --> 00:18:04.000 The modern industrial world as we know it 00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:06.000 is barely 300 years old. 00:18:06.000 --> 00:18:08.000 Now, that shallow history doesn't suggest to me 00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:11.000 that we have all the answers for all of the challenges 00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:13.000 that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. 00:18:13.000 --> 00:18:15.000 When these myriad cultures of the world 00:18:15.000 --> 00:18:18.000 are asked the meaning of being human, 00:18:18.000 --> 00:18:20.000 they respond with 10,000 different voices. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:20.000 --> 00:18:26.000 And it's within that song that we will all rediscover the possibility 00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:29.000 of being what we are: a fully conscious species, 00:18:29.000 --> 00:18:32.000 fully aware of ensuring that all peoples and all gardens 00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:38.000 find a way to flourish. And there are great moments of optimism. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:41.000 This is a photograph I took at the northern tip of Baffin Island 00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:43.000 when I went narwhal hunting with some Inuit people, 00:18:44.000 --> 00:18:47.000 and this man, Olayuk, told me a marvelous story of his grandfather. 00:18:48.000 --> 00:18:50.000 The Canadian government has not always been kind 00:18:50.000 --> 00:18:52.000 to the Inuit people, and during the 1950s, 00:18:52.000 --> 00:18:55.000 to establish our sovereignty, we forced them into settlements. 00:18:55.000 --> 00:18:59.000 This old man's grandfather refused to go. 00:18:59.000 --> 00:19:03.000 The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his weapons, 00:19:03.000 --> 00:19:04.000 all of his tools. 00:19:05.000 --> 00:19:07.000 Now, you must understand that the Inuit did not fear the cold; 00:19:07.000 --> 00:19:08.000 they took advantage of it. 00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:11.000 The runners of their sleds were originally made of fish 00:19:11.000 --> 00:19:12.000 wrapped in caribou hide. 00:19:12.000 --> 00:19:17.000 So, this man's grandfather was not intimidated by the Arctic night 00:19:17.000 --> 00:19:19.000 or the blizzard that was blowing. 00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:22.000 He simply slipped outside, pulled down his sealskin trousers 00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:26.000 and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze, 00:19:26.000 --> 00:19:29.000 he shaped it into the form of a blade. 00:19:29.000 --> 00:19:31.000 He put a spray of saliva on the edge of the shit knife 00:19:31.000 --> 00:19:34.000 and as it finally froze solid, he butchered a dog with it. 00:19:34.000 --> 00:19:37.000 He skinned the dog and improvised a harness, 00:19:37.000 --> 00:19:40.000 took the ribcage of the dog and improvised a sled, 00:19:41.000 --> 00:19:42.000 harnessed up an adjacent dog, 00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:46.000 and disappeared over the ice floes, shit knife in belt. 00:19:46.000 --> 00:19:50.000 Talk about getting by with nothing. (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:19:50.000 --> 00:19:51.000 And this, in many ways -- 00:19:51.000 --> 00:19:53.000 (Applause) -- 00:19:53.000 --> 00:19:55.000 is a symbol of the resilience of the Inuit people 00:19:55.000 --> 00:19:58.000 and of all indigenous people around the world. 00:19:58.000 --> 00:20:00.000 The Canadian government in April of 1999 00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:03.000 gave back to total control of the Inuit 00:20:03.000 --> 00:20:06.000 an area of land larger than California and Texas put together. 00:20:06.000 --> 00:20:08.000 It's our new homeland. It's called Nunavut. 00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:12.000 It's an independent territory. They control all mineral resources. 00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:14.000 An amazing example of how a nation-state 00:20:14.000 --> 00:20:18.000 can seek restitution with its people. NOTE Paragraph 00:20:19.000 --> 00:20:22.000 And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious 00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:23.000 at least to all of all us who've traveled 00:20:23.000 --> 00:20:25.000 in these remote reaches of the planet, 00:20:27.000 --> 00:20:28.000 to realize that they're not remote at all. 00:20:28.000 --> 00:20:30.000 They're homelands of somebody. 00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:32.000 They represent branches of the human imagination 00:20:32.000 --> 00:20:36.000 that go back to the dawn of time. And for all of us, 00:20:36.000 --> 00:20:39.000 the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, 00:20:39.000 --> 00:20:42.000 become part of the naked geography of hope. NOTE Paragraph 00:20:42.000 --> 00:20:46.000 So, what we're trying to do at the National Geographic, finally, 00:20:46.000 --> 00:20:50.000 is, we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything. 00:20:50.000 --> 00:20:51.000 We think that polemics -- 00:20:51.000 --> 00:20:53.000 (Applause) -- 00:20:53.000 --> 00:20:55.000 we think that polemics are not persuasive, 00:20:55.000 --> 00:20:58.000 but we think that storytelling can change the world, 00:20:58.000 --> 00:21:01.000 and so we are probably the best storytelling institution 00:21:01.000 --> 00:21:04.000 in the world. We get 35 million hits on our website every month. 00:21:04.000 --> 00:21:07.000 156 nations carry our television channel. 00:21:08.000 --> 00:21:10.000 Our magazines are read by millions. 00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:13.000 And what we're doing is a series of journeys 00:21:13.000 --> 00:21:15.000 to the ethnosphere where we're going to take our audience 00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:17.000 to places of such cultural wonder 00:21:18.000 --> 00:21:20.000 that they cannot help but come away dazzled 00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:22.000 by what they have seen, and hopefully, therefore, 00:21:22.000 --> 00:21:25.000 embrace gradually, one by one, 00:21:25.000 --> 00:21:27.000 the central revelation of anthropology: 00:21:27.000 --> 00:21:31.000 that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, 00:21:31.000 --> 00:21:32.000 that we can find a way to live 00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:35.000 in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world 00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:37.000 where all of the wisdom of all peoples 00:21:37.000 --> 00:21:40.000 can contribute to our collective well-being. NOTE Paragraph 00:21:40.000 --> 00:21:41.000 Thank you very much. 00:21:41.000 --> 00:21:43.000 (Applause)