Ethnospheres are Humankind
[part 1 of 2]
© David Moorhead — April 2007
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This article was inspired by Wade Davis’ eloquent talk at TED dot com, a talk celebrating the extraordinary diversity of the world’s indigenous cultures and languages, their ethnospheres, many of which are disappearing. Davis, who reminds us that ethnospheres are humankind, is a National Geographic Explorer in Residence, an anthropologist and botanist by training. My delight and much fascination
inspired this essay [part 1 of 2], highlighting a few of his revelations in
a talk videoed in Monterey, California USA, February, 2003. Refer TEDTalks at ted dot
com.
Davis speaks to the ideas of not only preserving the biosphere, but also the ethnosphere defined as “the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.”
The central revelation of anthropology is the worlds in which you and I live do not exist in one absolute reality for all. Peoples’ worlds of ideas and behaviors are the sum total of myriad realities of all Earthlings’ communities; the music of our languages dancing and singing together is like a web surrounding Planet Earth. This should fill us with hope: Other Earthlings’ cultures show us the many cadences in the music of other ways of being, in other ways of thinking and orienting ourselves to the geographies we call Earth.
The peoples who still notice the wind against their faces, or see the beauty of rocks polished into shiny stones by the rain, or who travel beyond the galaxy during their sacred moments are the very ones who are being involuntarily displaced. Fifty percent of the world’s 6000 languages are no longer taught to children, as ancestral lands are lost and languages fade into oblivion. Displacements are caused by identifiable sources from which indigenous peoples have no recourse.
Ethnospheres are humankind magnificently displayed by the universe in the indigenous ways of being, that are reduced by human trafficking to the margins of an imagined real world in impetuous industrial lifestyles.
[Go to part 2 of 2, Polychromatic Worlds of Being]
Our constant curiosity
is key
to watching what’s being created.
~ David Moorhead |