Culture Warrior
Anthropologist and explorer Wade Davis
Rated
by his students as ‘one of the coolest humans on the planet’, Wade Davis is also a celebrated anthropologist, explorer, film maker, culture warrior, and even ‘a true-life Indiana Jones’.
Davis describes himself more modestly as just a storyteller.
The Vancouver-based professor has investigated zombies in Haiti, lived and hunted with tribes along the Amazon, and explored vanishing indigenous cultures from Borneo to Tibet.
Trained in anthropology and botany at Harvard University, Davis travels the globe to document ‘ancient wisdom’ in books, articles and
documentaries such as the critically-acclaimed TV series Light at the Edge of the World.
He was a National Geographic explorer-in-residence for 13 years and recently published a collection of photographs from his many journeys.
Davis’ PNG expeditions include the Trobriand Islands and the Sepik River, as well as the Eastern and Southern Highlands, where he studied the Sambia and Huli communities.
“PNG is an old-growth forest of the human mind and incubator of human languages,” he says.
“The land is an extraordinary convergence of geography and culture, with up to a thousand languages, or more.”
Davis regards each of these languages as “a different way of looking at the world” and “a knowledge that we need to preserve”.
Davis is also enthralled by ancient Melanesian knowledge of stars, currents, clouds and wave patterns.
He sailed the Pacific in a seafaring canoe with descendants of navigators who reached the region’s most remote islands 3000 years ago. “These young sailors on the
Hokulea (voyaging canoe) used their ancestors’ navigation techniques and the skill set is simply dazzling,” he says.
Davis believes climate change has made it important to learn from other cultures, “to balance ourselves so that we do not destroy what is around us”.
PNG is an old-growth forest of the human mind and incubator of human languages.
“My mission is to change the way the world views and values different cultures,” he says.
The origin of that mission dates back to the 1950s. Davis was raised in a middle-class Montreal suburb in Canada at a time when the mutually suspicious English and French communities often lived in separate areas.
“As a youngster I remember looking across Cartier Boulevard, enchanted by the idea that across the street was another language, religion and way of being,” he says.
“My oldest sister fell in love with a francophone boy and shattered the boundary. As a result I slipped through that line and started hanging out in the French-speaking village.”
At the age of 20, Davis ‘slipped through’ a more dangerous line when accompanying the renowned English author and explorer, Sebastian Snow.
By foot, they crossed the Darien Gap, a remote stretch of swampy forest on the border of Panama and Colombia. The notorious black zone has long been home to pirates, malaria, poisonous snakes and armed drug smugglers.
Apart from the adventure, Davis was attracted by the area’s indigenous groups, rare wildlife and exotic plants.
Since then, he’s put his survival and botanical skills to good use by investigating coca growth in Colombia, as part of the US government’s efforts to control cocaine trafficking.
“I’m now working to help Colombia reposition itself in the global community after
years of agony caused by global consumption of cocaine,” he says.
“The country’s rebounding after years of agony that left 250,000 people dead and seven million displaced.”
Davis argues strongly that everyone who’s used cocaine “has blood on their hands”.
“You’ve got young, hip bankers in London who donate money to save the rainforests. Yet they sniff cocaine at night in the bars, without realising that every time they use it, they kill an Indian.”
Davis is often asked how he breaks down the barriers when he’s a guest of Indians and other indigenous groups. How do you get a shaman to reveal his secrets?
His response is very Canadian: self-deprecation and politeness.
“Instead of declaring ‘I want to study you,’ you say: ‘ You know so much about the plants, I’d like you to teach me about them.’ Studying plants, makes sense to people. You’re exploring their base of knowledge, their wisdom.”
According to Davis, building rapport also involves good manners by eating what’s offered to you, whether its live termites in the Amazon jungle, or barbecued bats in the PNG Highlands.
“I would eat a plate of food that I knew would give me dysentery,” he says. “I used to call it the Dysentery Breakfast. As long as it doesn’t kill you, you eat it.”
In fact, he’s found that sharing food is an important gesture of friendship in all the cultures he’s studied. He gives the example of drinking rice wine in an Iban longhouse in Sarawak.
“I had my head in the lap of this wonderful local woman who kept pouring wine into my mouth. I didn’t want to get drunk and have a hangover in the tropics, but she said: ‘ You must drink it. This is not wine this is our love.’ And kept pouring.”
Nevertheless, there have been some limits to what Davis will drink. During the 1980s he investigated claims that Haitian witchdoctors could keep people in a pharmacologically-induced trance for many years by slipping them a tetrodotoxin poison derived from the puffer fish.
Reports said the poison brought on a state of apparent death that could fool a physician. And the so-called ‘dead’ could later be
Wade Davis Photographs is available at amazon. com. In the book, Davis has selected 150 of his favourite photos from a lifetime of exploring. ‘brought back to life’ as zombies.
Davis published his investigations into zombies and voodoo culture in a controversial book called The
Serpent and the Rainbow. It sold well and inspired a Hollywood horror flick of the same name.
Now in his mid-60s, Davis still travels rough and is planning further adventures, including making a documentary in rural Tibet.
“A lot of people my age are thinking about retirement,” he says. “But I’ve never had a job and am still thinking about what I’ll do when I grow up.“