Davis, Wade. "Anthropologist Wade Davis Discusses His Life and Work." New Books in Anthropology (May 5, 2021) ["Of the three major influences on Wade Davis’ life and work one of the most important is the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder, and in this interview the professor shares how foundational that connection remains. This is just one highlight of many he shares about his thinking and writing as Wade indulges my interest in his ‘craft of culture’ on his path to becoming a renowned storyteller. This professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, former Explorer-in-Residence for the National Geographic Society, and award-winning author, Davis shares the interesting back stories of his best-selling first book, The Serpent and The Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey Into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic, about his research into Haitian ‘zombie poison’, how his hypothesis was publically challenged, and how the Hollywood movie version was just the kind of cultural distortion he was trying to overcome with his book. In the course of talking about this first book which helped launch his writing career he shares thoughts about academic writing more generally and in particular how his PhD thesis, Passage of Darkness, is really a sterile version of the richer and more textured narrative of the first book even though the latter is preferred by academics. For that matter, Wade has something to say about academic objectivity before we move on to talk about his influential One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest, his CBC lectures-inspired The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, and his award-winning Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest. He also speaks at length about the influence of his Harvard mentors – the British anthropologist David May Ray Lewis, and the botanist and plant explorer Richard Evan Schultes, and how he and the late botanical explorer Tim Plowman made up the ‘coca project’ and the significance of ‘the divine leaf of immortality’."]
---. "Dreams From Endangered Cultures." TED Talks (January 2007) ["With stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate."]
---. "Famed Explorer Wade Davis — How to Become the Architect of Your Life, The Divine Leaf of Immortality, Rites of Passage, Voodoo Demystified, Optimism as the Purpose of Life, How to Be a Prolific Writer, Psychedelics, ..." The Tim Ferris Show #652 (January 27, 2023) ["Wade Davis (@wadedavisofficial, daviswade.com) is Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Between 2000 and 2013, he served as Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Wade holds degrees in anthropology and biology and a PhD in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing The Serpent and the Rainbow, an international bestseller, later released by Universal as a motion picture. In recent years, his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia, and the high Arctic of Nunavut and Greenland."]
---. "Indigenous cultures hold the keys to sustaining our planet. At COP15, will we finally be listening?" The Globe and Mail (December 10, 2022) ["For these societies, the land is alive, a dynamic force to be embraced and transformed by the human imagination. Reciprocity, as opposed to extraction, is the norm."]
---. "Notes from an author: Wade Davis on Colombia's Magdalena River." National Geographic (February 18, 2021) ["A journey along the Río Magdalena reveals a sacred tributary, the Río Claro — a repository of stories that paints a unique picture of the country."]
---. The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. Anansi, 2009. ["Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures. In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true lost civilization, the Peoples of the Anaconda. In the Andes we discover that the earth really is alive, while in Australia we experience Dreamtime, the all-embracing philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa. We then travel to Nepal, where we encounter a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, who emerges from forty-five years of Buddhist retreat and solitude. And finally we settle in Borneo, where the last rainforest nomads struggle to survive. Understanding the lessons of this journey will be our mission for the next century. For at risk is the human legacy -- a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination. Rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit, as expressed by culture, is among the central challenges of our time."]
---. "The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World." (Posted on Youtube: June 20, 2013) ["Presenting at a plenary session of the 2013 Climate, Mind, & Behavior Symposium, anthropologist Wade Davis illuminates the need to embrace and celebrate the cultural and intellectual diversity that constitutes the totality of human experience, especially when considering fundamental questions of how we are to relate to our environment." Based on his book: The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World]---. "The Worldwide Web of Belief and Ritual." TED Talks (January 2008) ["Anthropologist Wade Davis muses on the worldwide web of belief and ritual that makes us human. He shares breathtaking photos and stories of the Elder Brothers, a group of Sierra Nevada indians whose spiritual practice holds the world in balance."]
Deloria, Philip, et al. "A New History of Humanity." Open Source (August 11, 2022) ["Giant questions this hour, and a slew of fresh answers: Where do we humans come from? Who are we, after all? Where are we going? Was our pre-history a Garden of Eden, or a nasty war of survival, or some of both? Are we human beings good or evil, by the way? Pretty much the same, the world around, or many different varieties? An anthropologist and an archaeologist walked into a bar, so to speak—into an endless chain of emails, in fact, and produced a bestseller, chock full of Stone Age history and modern science. Their book is titled The Dawn of Everything. A main argument is that we’ve been one free-wheeling, improvisational species for fifty thousand years. A main question might be: when and how did we get to feel so stuck in this 21st century? Make way this hour for the news of our human pre-history. Could it be: that our Stone Age ancestors were just as smart as we are, as playful and strong—if anything more inventive and adaptive than we, as they settled a planet and seeded a great variety of civilizations 10,000 years ago? The questions come from a surprise bestseller, The Dawn of Everything: it’s a 600-page brick of a book by an anthropologist and an archeologist, sharing fresh evidence and best guesses in A New History of Humanity. The sadness in reading it is that the American co-author David Graeber died as he was finishing the great work of his life. The relief is that his writing partner in London, David Wengrow, is still grappling with the puzzles they posed."]
Gosden, Chris. "Shapeshifters, Shamans, and the New Animism." To the Best of Our Knowledge (November 20, 2021) ["Shapeshifting images run deep in human history, going back to ancient cave paintings. Oxford University archeologist Chris Gosden thinks they're linked to the shaman's ability to cross into the spirit world where humans and animals merge. He says animist beliefs are gaining new traction among some scientists, and they raise profound questions about the nature of consciousness."]
Graeber, David. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World. Fararr, Straus, and Giroux, 2024. ["Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews. "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes. There are converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a mythical past. Thinking against the grain, Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future—to imagine a social order based on humans’ fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time— inequality, technology, the identity of “the West,” democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest—he challenges the old assumptions about political life. A trenchant critic of the order of things, and driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different. During a moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, the incisive, entertaining, and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . , edited and with an introduction by Nika Dubrovsky and with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit, make for essential and inspiring reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic, playful, necessary thinker."]
Greenberg, Udi. "The Abuses of Prehistory: Beware of theories about human nature based on the study of our earliest ancestors." The New Republic (May 10, 2024) ["With such diametrically opposed claims, it may seem that these books share little beyond pretentious titles. But as historian Stefanos Geroulanos reveals in his original and exciting new book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession With Human Origins, both are part of the same intellectual tradition: the ambitious desire of European and North American thinkers to transform humanity by reconstructing its deep past. Geroulanos charts the history of this effort, which began in the late eighteenth century, with a dazzling survey of countless anthropologists, scientists, and artists. By studying bones, art in caves, or nomad tribes, these thinkers believed they could answer humanity’s fundamental questions: Are we cruel or compassionate? Monogamous or polygamous? Are there “natural” ways to organize our families, religious rites, or social institutions? The answers they offered varied enormously and often led to bitter disputes. What they all shared, and what they left for us, was the belief that prehistory is the key to understanding ourselves."]
King, Charles. "How A Few 'Renegade' Thinkers Helped Usher In A New Era Of Anthropology." Fresh Air (August 20, 2019) ["In his new book, Gods of the Upper Air, Charles King tells the story of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead and the other 20th century anthropologists who challenged outdated notions of race, class and gender."]
Seaford, Richard. "On the Origins of the Soul." The Secret History of Western Esotericism (September 13, 2017) ["In some of the earliest documents we possess from Indo-European cultures – the Rg Veda and the Homeric poems – the human beings depicted do not have ‘souls’. That is to say, they have organs of what we might call different types of consciousness, but there is no indication that there is a unifying principle which knits all the different organs together. Then, at the beginning of the sixth century BCE, something rather startling happens: in both Indian texts (the Brahmanas, Upanishads, and others) and in Greece (in the movement known as Pre-Socratic philosophy) the notion arises that there is indeed a unifying, bounded, and possibly immortal soul. Richard Seaford has a provocative theory, based in a sociological / anthropological approach, as to why this new and revolutionary idea comes into being at just this time in just these places. Whether you agree with him or not, you will not want to miss Professor Seaford’s masterful survey of the Greek and Sanskritic evidence for the first appearance of that most essential entity, the soul.
Other fascinating themes touched on:What is the ‘Axial Age’, and what makes it so ‘axial’? The problems of dating the Homeric poems and the Rg Veda. The origins of the concept of the incorporeal in Greece and India. What money and private property have to do with the rise of the soul."]
Other fascinating themes touched on:What is the ‘Axial Age’, and what makes it so ‘axial’? The problems of dating the Homeric poems and the Rg Veda. The origins of the concept of the incorporeal in Greece and India. What money and private property have to do with the rise of the soul."]
Shaviro, Steven. "Anarchism and Principle of Play: Steven Shaviro reviews David Graeber’s posthumous essay collection The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World." Los Angeles Review of Books (November 15, 2024) ["The volume’s title comes from an earlier book by Graeber: in The Utopia of Rules, he wrote that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Such rhetoric is typical for Graeber: a phrase that sounds grandiose (“the ultimate, hidden truth”) is brought down to earth, since the “secret” really consists of things that we already do on an everyday basis. Graeber is unusually optimistic for an anti-capitalist activist: he seeks to remind us that we ourselves have ultimately constructed the forms and institutions that oppress us, which means that these structures of social and economic life have no necessity to them but can be reorganized in multiple ways. Some of these ways may in fact be substantially better than anything we have now."]
Shipman, Pat. Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs. Belknap Press, 2023. ["Dogs and humans have been inseparable for more than 40,000 years. The relationship has proved to be a pivotal development in our evolutionary history. The same is also true for our canine friends; our connection with them has had much to do with their essential nature and survival. How and why did humans and dogs find their futures together, and how have these close companions (literally) shaped each other? Award-winning anthropologist Pat Shipman finds answers in prehistory and the present day. In Our Oldest Companions, Shipman untangles the genetic and archaeological evidence of the first dogs. She follows the trail of the wolf-dog, neither prehistoric wolf nor modern dog, whose bones offer tantalizing clues about the earliest stages of domestication. She considers the enigma of the dingo, not quite domesticated yet not entirely wild, who has lived intimately with humans for thousands of years while actively resisting control or training. Shipman tells how scientists are shedding new light on the origins of the unique relationship between our two species, revealing how deep bonds formed between humans and canines as our guardians, playmates, shepherds, and hunters. Along the journey together, dogs have changed physically, behaviorally, and emotionally, as humans too have been transformed. Dogs’ labor dramatically expanded the range of human capability, altering our diets and habitats and contributing to our very survival. Shipman proves that we cannot understand our own history as a species without recognizing the central role that dogs have played in it."]
Upholt, Boyce. "Monuments Upon the Tumultuous Earth." Emergence Magazine (March 28, 2023) ["For thousands of years, the southern Mississippi River has been shaping the land it traverses—and the structures humans have built along it. Over vast stretches of time, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids, fifty-acre plazas, and intricate clusters of hillocks along this wild waterway. In this narrated essay, Boyce Upholt charts the shifting course of the river and the civilizations that have emerged alongside it. Beholding the 2,200-mile levee system that now curbs the river’s torrent, he wonders: what do our monuments say about who we are—and the crises we face?"]
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