I read an excellent and sensitive wordpress blog today at knowthesphere that praised the wisdom of ancient cultures over the knowledge-inundated, wisdom-starved modern world. The blog was titled Birds of Wisdom and the quote below is from the blog:
Ancient wisdom–in a way–is much more advanced than our own contemporary knowledge that we place so highly on a pedestal.
The blog reminded me of a fellow named Wade Davis, an ethno-botanist who studied with the legendary Harvard botanist and traveler, Richard Evans Schultes. Davis is now a resident explorer at National Geographic. He lived among the natives of Columbian and Equadorian Amazonas who retain the ability, long lost among modern humans, to communicate with the plants in the forest. Talk about ancient wisdom! The remarkable book his South American adventures produced is called One River. He later went to Haiti on behalf of Schultes to investigate the medical wizardry involved in the creation of a zombie. He describes his deep respect for the wisdom and ancient power of the Voudoun tradition in a book, The Serpent and the Rainbow one of several he has written. The zombie phenomenon turns out to be much more complex and sophisticated than mere biochemistry.
Wade Davis delivered the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Canada’s public broadcaster) distinguished annual Massey Lectures in 2009. There are five lectures in each series delivered by the same author. The Massey Lectures are produced by the CBC’s wonderful nightly Ideas program. You can listen to a podcast of the first of Davis’ lectures from this CBC website link and the series is available in book form or on iTunes. All five podcasts are no longer on the CBC site. I was particularly moved and impressed by his second Massey Lecture, called The Wayfinders, about the amazing set of natural knowledge that the Polynesian navigators used to guide their boats from one remote, tiny island to another remote, tiny island. Polynesians had been brilliantly finding their way throughout the Pacific islands for a long, long time before the Spanish arrived, hugging the shoreline.
I could go on… The quickest way to whet your appetite is to listen to his rapid-fire TED talk. The downside of that is that it only scratches the surface of his deep love for the ancient and his peripatetic research.
mightyturk 