Just listened to an excellent CBC documentary called “Wade Davis and The End of the Wild”. (The link is to the program page, which currently has a graphic to the part 2 that’s coming out next week; scroll down the page if you’re reading this later. This is the direct MP3 link to part one.)
Davis makes one of my favorite points about anthropology very well — specifically, arguing against the mistake most of us make in thinking that aspects of our own culture must be common to all humanity:
We tend to view indigenous cultures around the world as quaint and colorful, but nevertheless somehow marginal to the overall thrust of history which we represent, moving inexorably forward in this technological modern world. To view cultures as marginal is to miss the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live in does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality.
We in our kind of arrogance assume that we are the stream of history, but we forget that other societies present other kinds of choices, which have different consequences. For example, if you walk by a homeless person on the streets of Toronto, you see that individual as the sad and unfortunate, but inevitable consequence of economic reality. But if you’re a Gabra, raised in the deserts of Kenya, you’re raised to believe that a poor man shames ourselves.
[Later in the interview, comparing the lives of a child in Borneo and Beverly Hills:] Then you start asking the more important questions, of the Beverly Hills kid, how many days did you spend with your Dad this month? Days? Are you crazy? We know statistically that the average father in America spends 17 minutes with their children every day, and we have the audacity to step back and assume that our society has the monopoly on the avenue to truth and social solidarity?
Davis concludes by equating E.O. Wilson’s famous comment about the 20th century — that it will be remembered, not for wars or technological advance, but for Earth’s massive loss of biodiversity — with the impact that it had on human cultural knowledge:
We are living through a period of time where literally half of humanity’s knowledge is being lost. Cultural diversity has flourished in the history of our species, but today we are living in a period of condensation that is astonishing. Of the 6,000 languages that were spoken when I was a young boy, over half are not being taught to schoolchildren. That means they’re effectively dead. There are only 300 languages today that are spoken by more than a million people.
Those half of the languages that are disappearing literally represent half of humanity’s repertoire. People say, “oh, we can make computers, we can make planes…”. No, I’m talking about the overall human adaptive repertoire to the common problems that afflict us all. Every time [a native stops learning or practicing his culture], a facet of the possibility of life is lost, and this is what this period of time represents.
Finally, he wraps up with a quote about how we view science that goes into my quote-of-the-year category:
Even those of us who like to think we love nature sometimes can miss the whole point of the wonder of biology. There was this horrific book that came out called The Secret Life of Plants that made this big deal about plants responding to Mozart. [My friend Timothy Plum] said to me: “Why would a plant give a shit about Mozart? And even if it did, why should that impress us? They can eat light. Isn’t that enough?”
Cute: is it [neutral point of view] to say the animal to the right has been called “cute”? Opinions vary.