Polychromatic Worlds of Being
[part 2 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 2 of 2], highlighting a few of his revelations in
a talk videoed in Monterey, California USA, February, 2003. Refer TEDTalks at ted dot
com.
In just a few years, our grandchildren will look back with some wonderment not at the armed combats we allowed, but at the indigenous peoples and their ways of being we allowed to be quietly eliminated. This era’s generation may be remembered as having neither actively endorsed nor passively accepted the massive destruction of biodiverse, polychromatic worlds of being.
The problem isn’t change, because all species dance with the biological possibilities for their lives. And, the problem isn’t technology itself. The Sioux Indians didn’t stop being Sioux after giving up the bow and arrow any more than U.S. residents stopped being Americans after giving up the horse and buggy.
It’s not change or technology threatening Earth’s ethnospheres, it is power—the crude face of domination. Whenever you look around to other cultures, you realize these cultures are not destined to fade away. These are dynamic living human beings being driven out of existence by forces beyond indigenous capacities for adaptation.
Genocide, the physical extinction of a people, is universally condemned. But ethnocide, the destruction of peoples’ ways of living is not only not condemned, it’s celebrated by many industrialists as urban development strategy. Some indigenous peoples view industrialized people as little brothers who are destroying the world.
It all comes down to the choice of living in monochromatic worlds of monotony, or embracing polychromatic worlds of diversity. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, once said (and the following is paraphrased) her greatest fear was that as we morph toward a blandly generic world view, not only would we see the entire range of human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but we would awaken from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities.
It’s humbling to remember our species has perhaps been around for some 600,000 years. In the Neolithic revolution, a time in which humans discovered agriculture, we succumbed to the cult of the seed. Then, the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood; we created hierarchy, specialization, and surplus—only 10,000 years ago. The modern industrial world is only 300 years old, and that shallow history does not suggest we have answers to the challenges confronting us this millennia.
Polychromatic worlds of being, and indigenous languages and stories that create them, are not lost to artists, who reflect the modern mind that remembers the meaning for ‘the last shall be first.’
Artists are here to disturb the peace.
~ James Arthur Baldwin (b 1924), poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright
[Go to part 1 of 2, Ethnospheres Are Humankind]
Our constant curiosity
is key
to watching what’s being created.
~ David Moorhead |