Death and life in the ethnosphere - The Naked Geography Of Hope

Whole Earth, Spring, 2002 by Wade Davis

In Haiti, a Vodoun priestess responds to the rhythm of drums and, taken by the spirit, handles burning embers with impunity. In the Amazon, a Waorani hunter detects the scent of animal urine at forty paces and identifies the species that deposited it. In the deserts of northern Kenya, Rendille nomads draw blood from the faces of camels, and survive on a diet of milk and herbs gathered in the shade of frail acacia trees. On an escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadow of clouds cast upon ice.

Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention. Our way of life in the West, with its stunning technological wizardry, its cities dense with intrigue, is but one alternative rooted in a particular intellectual lineage. Polynesian seafarers who sense the presence of distant atolls in the echo of waves, Naxi shaman of Yunnan who carve mystical tales into rock, Juwasi Bushmen who have lived for generations in open truce with the lions of the Kalahari, reveal other options, means of interpreting existence, ways of being.

Together the cultures of the world make up an intellectual and spiritual web of life, an ethnosphere that envelopes and insulates the planet, and is as vital to our collective well-being as is the biosphere. Think of the ethnosphere as the sum total of thoughts, beliefs, myths, and intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. It is humanity's greatest legacy, the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species.

Tragically, just as the biosphere is being severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere, and at a far greater rate. No biologist would dare suggest that half of all species are on the brink of extinction. Yet this, the most apocalyptic assessment of the future of biological diversity, scarcely approaches what is known to be the best conceivable scenario for the fate of the world's cultures.

The key indicator is language loss. Every two weeks an elder carries a language to the grave. Of the 6,000 languages still spoken, fully half are not being taught to children. A language is not merely a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules; it is a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Within a single generation, we are witnessing the loss of fully half of humanity's legacy [see special section on disappearing languages, Whole Earth, Spring 2000--Ed.].

HAITI

Anthropologists are sometimes accused of endorsing an extreme relativism. Quite to the contrary, anthropology seeks not the elimination of judgment but merely its suspension, in order that the judgments we are ethically obliged to make may be informed by deep understanding. The anthropological lens focuses most sharply when turned to those situations in which a people and a culture have been unjustly pilloried because of traditions and beliefs that outsiders, in their ignorance, fail to understand.

Consider Haiti. When I traveled there to seek the formula of the folk preparations reputed to be used to create zombies, my first challenge was to set aside all of my preconceptions about this remarkable land and the religion of its people. It's curious. If I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what would you say? Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism.... There is always one place on the planet left out: sub-Saharan Africa, the tacit assumption being that African people had no formal religion. Of course, by ethnographic fact, they did.

Vodoun is not a black magic cult, but rather the distillation of profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic diaspora of the slavery era and were sown in the fertile soil of the New World. A complex metaphysical worldview, it is a dynamic faith in which the dead give birth to the spirits, and the spirits in turn may be invoked by the living such that the believer for a brief shining moment actually becomes the god.

It is the quintessentially democratic faith, for the believer not only has direct access to the divine; he or she actually becomes the spirit. The Haitians, indeed, walk in and out of their spirit realm with an ease and impunity that has always astonished the ethnographic observer. When Joseph Campbell was asked to name one religion on Earth where the people actually live their spiritual convictions, his choice was Vodoun. As the Haitians say, white people go to church and speak about god, we dance in the temple and become god.

Spirit possession for the Haitian is not a moment of social pathology, but the hand of divine grace. Once taken by the spirit, the acolyte becomes the god, and as a god cannot be harmed. Thus one sees in Haiti a window open wide to the mystical. Individuals' handling of burning embers is an astonishing example of the power of the mind--when catalyzed during a state of extreme excitation--to affect the body that bears it.