Culture, at stake

His official title is Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, but Wade Davis is also an ethnobotanist, anthropologist and biologist whose passion to document indigenous world cultures resulted in the four-part TV series Light at the End of the World that aired last spring.

This month Davis brings his expertise to the Ikeda Theater at Mesa Arts Center to share excerpts from this striking broadcast as well as lecture about what he sees as the world’s “poetry of diversity.”

“One of the intense pleasures of my life has been the opportunity to live among peoples who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel the past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants,” Davis says in an online interview at www.ngcasia.com. “Just to know that Jaguar shaman still journey beyond the Milky Way, that the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, that in the mountains of Tibet the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma is to remember the key revelation of anthropology. This idea is that the world into which we are born does not exist in some absolute sense but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of adaptive choices that our particular cultural lineage made, however successfully, many generations ago.”

Davis coined the word “ethnosphere,” to refer to the cultural fabric that envelops the planet, a fabric that is quickly deteriorating. He cites indigenous languages as the most prominent victim of globalization.

“There are at present some 6,000 languages,” he says in a recent National Public Radio interview. “But of these fully half are not being taught to children, which means that effectively, unless something changes, these languages are already dead.”

Catch the explorer’s views of our past and future, along with breathtaking scenes of indigenous cultures Jan. 9 at the Ikeda Theater, Mesa Arts Center, 1 E. Main St., Mesa. Tickets: $26 – $38. Info: visit www.mesaartscenter.com or call (480) 985-0423.