Product Description

An international best-seller when first published, this is Wade Davis's portrait of the richness and diversity of the world's indigenous cultures and why they matter to us all.

Davis has travelled the world for more than thirty years, studying the mysteries of sacred plants and celebrating the poetics of culture. His explorations of indigenous life in places as remote and diverse as the Canadian Arctic, the rain forests of Borneo and the Amazon, and the surreal cultural landscape of Haiti have taught him that many of these cultures are in danger of losing their way of life -- a loss that affects humans on a global scale.

In Light at the Edge of the World Davis' looks at the "ethnosphere" -- the diversity of ways of thinking and living that traditional cultures have to teach us about our place in the world, and how we affect one another and our surroundings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #314653 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 179 pages

Amazon.ca
Ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis has spent his career studying the world's remaining indigenous peoples, whose distinct cultures are being wiped out by the forces of globalization and modernization. Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures is a record of his extraordinary experiences in both photographs and text. Davis travels to Haiti to learn the secret of a drug that turns people into zombies, and ends up learning about the dynamic faith of Vodoun, with its belief in a reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead. He explores the plight of nomadic peoples like the Penan in Borneo, who are losing their forest homeland to invasive logging. The Ariaal and Rendille of Kenya, whose ability or unwillingness, respectively, to adapt their herding practices in the wake of drought, famine, and inter-ethnic war in neighbouring countries, are ensuring their own survival or their death. He traverses the length of the Andean Cordillera to locate the place of origin of the revered coca plant, and participates in one community's tradition of the annual running of the boundaries. He looks at the Tibetan people's resiliency and their determination to survive as a nation despite Chinese occupation.

From Davis's first, life-altering contact with an old Gitxsan man in the Spatsizi wilderness of northwestern British Columbia, through his adventures in far-flung lands, to his experiences hunting with the Inuit in the newly formed Canadian territory of Nunavut, Light at the Edge of the World charts the intellectual and spiritual making of a scientist passionately concerned about the fate of this planet's diverse cultures. It highlights just a handful of the indigenous peoples whose subtly complex world views, formed within and in response to their own, often harsh, geographies, reveal the expanses of the human imagination. The book rings a cautionary note about the evils and arrogance of modernity. As Davis quotes one of his mentors, David Maybury-Lewis, as saying: "Genocide, the physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of a people's way of life, is not only not condemned when it comes to indigenous peoples. It is advocated as appropriate policy." But it also touches on the adaptability of these ancient peoples. In the example of Nunavut, where the indigenous people have been granted self-government, Davis indicates a road back from devastation.

Intimate, breathtaking photographs animate the intelligent eloquence of Davis's essay. It is a testament to the author's own storytelling power that the reader of this book feels as if he or she were sitting around a campfire with the anthropologist, entranced by marvellous tales, as Davis once listened to the old Gitxsan. --Diana Kuprel

From Publishers Weekly
"As a young anthropologist I never understood how I was supposed to turn up at some village... announce that I was staying for a year, and then notify the headman that he and his people were to feed and house me while I studied their lives," writes Davis (Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire) in the introduction to this stunning collection of photographs that span the 25 years of his career. His solution was to find cultural common ground through the study of food and plants, which often was the ostensible reason for his travels through Canada, the Andes, the Amazon, Haiti, Kenya and Tibet. While Davis emphasizes that "at no time was photography [my] principal pursuit," his photographs are visually dazzling. A smiling Barasana boy of the Northwest Amazon holds a brilliantly colored macaw. A man in Haiti stands beneath the downpour of a torrential cataract, his clothes torn off by the force of the water. Indeed, these dramatic photographs frequently overshadow Davis's informative, witty essays, which introduce each of the seven chapters. In these, he shares anecdotes about the people he's met, reflects on the effects of colonialism in these areas and laments the uncertain fate of groups like the Penan of Borneo and the nomads of Kenya. Beautifully designed and produced, this album will delight armchair travelers.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Ethnobotanist and anthropologist Davis, author of One River (1996) and Shadows in the Sun (1998), has traveled the world for 25 years, pen and camera in hand, to study the myriad ways indigenous people live in physical and spiritual intimacy with the natural world. Driven by curiosity and a profound respect for the "ethnosphere," humanity's diverse "thoughts, beliefs, myths, and intuitions," Davis has dwelled among the people of the Arctic, the Amazon, Haiti, Kenya, Borneo, Australia, and Tibet, learning their modes of being, cosmologies, and botanical expertise. His quest has rendered him acutely sensitive to the connection between biodiversity and cultural diversity, and as he portrays in pellucid language and magnificent photographs healers, shamans, hunters, and men, women, and children adept at survival in the most demanding of wildernesses, he decries the rampant environmental destruction and globalization that are decimating indigenous cultures, thus depriving future generations of their knowledge, wisdom, and unique perspectives. Aesthetically powerful in both word and image, this essential volume opens readers' eyes and imaginations to the wonders of the earth and humanity's varied "insights into the very nature of existence," a bounty and legacy we simply cannot do without. Donna Seaman
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