From Vanishing Cultures to Zombies: Anthropologist Captivates on Global Ed Day
Cultures that we might consider backward or out-of-touch actually may be ingenious, a professor of anthropology explained during Groton School’s Global Education Day, October 28.
“Other cultures of the world are not failed attempts at being you, or being modern,” Wade Davis of the University of British Columbia told the Groton community. Professor Davis, who has been named an "Explorer of the Millennium" by the National Geographic Society, spoke at an all-school lecture and several smaller gatherings, covering topics such as cultural relativism, linguistics, war, and his own experiences interacting with indigenous cultures around the world.
He described Polynesian settlers whose realm of exploration spanned the entire Pacific Ocean and indigenous Colombian peoples whose culture survived decades of bloody Cold War–era conflict. He identified ideology as the main threat to culture, citing the industrial destruction of indigenous populations’ homes, persecution of religious practitioners by Marxist regimes, and the fact that Aboriginal Australians did not value expansion and technological progress and were consequently considered by the British to be less than human.
Davis also discussed linguistics and its role in cultural diversity. Around the time that most Groton students were born, there were about 7,000 languages spoken around the world, he said, but now a language dies every two weeks. Half of the world’s languages are no longer being taught to children, and with an insufficient number of trained linguists to document the languages, they are disappearing along with the un-translatable knowledge that they contain, according to Davis.
In a question-and-answer session after the first lecture, Davis said that he often stays in touch with the people he meets and returns to the places he’s visited. When asked how he keeps in touch with people, he replied simply: “the Internet,” going on to say that technology is never a threat to culture and that the Internet has been a vital tool for indigenous peoples, allowing them to coordinate with other groups facing a common problem.
Davis’ second lecture told the story of British World War I veterans who, after the war, attempted to summit Mt. Everest. Witnessing the carnage of war had changed the men’s outlook on life, enabling them to take on the grueling and dangerous task of climbing the tallest mountain in the world. Davis illustrated the scale of the destruction these men faced in the war, explaining that, on the British-German front, about one million artillery shells were launched each day. Cremation and plastic surgery were practices born from the war due to the widespread death and mutilation. Davis also discussed linguistics and its role in cultural diversity. Around the time that most Groton students were born, there were about 7,000 languages spoken around the world, he said, but now a language dies every two weeks. Half of the world’s languages are no longer being taught to children, and with an insufficient number of trained linguists to document the languages, they are disappearing along with the un-translatable knowledge that they contain, according to Davis.
In a question-and-answer session after the first lecture, Davis said that he often stays in touch with the people he meets and returns to the places he’s visited. When asked how he keeps in touch with people, he replied simply: “the Internet,” going on to say that technology is never a threat to culture and that the Internet has been a vital tool for indigenous peoples, allowing them to coordinate with other groups facing a common problem.
Yet the ultimate result of the war on these men was not hopelessness, Davis explained, but rather a sense that life was precious and effervescent—and that how one lived was more important than how long one lived. Davis ended the lecture by praising the climbers as “men of decency, honor, discretion, and decorum” and “a kind of men that we will never know again.”
The final lecture discussed the Vodou religion in Haiti and zombification; Davis explained that Vodou’s reputation as “black magic” is due to misconceptions spread by American military forces and has little to do with the religion itself. Vodou is different from many religions, however, because there is no separation between the material and spiritual: during worship, practitioners become divine, and the power of spiritual possession is “real, immediate, and overwhelming,” according to Davis.
He detailed his investigation of a reported zombification, working with a Vodou priest to obtain a folk preparation capable of putting a person into a death-like state that could fool even trained doctors (and reportedly had). He discovered that the preparation contained tetrodotoxin, a powerful neurotoxin. When dosed properly with the folk preparation, a person would appear dead and then recover, but thereafter be ostracized and considered in a purgatory-like state between the living and the dead. The folk preparation might be administered to someone who violated social or spiritual standards of the community, Davis said.
From the ingenious inventions of indigenous peoples to real-life zombies, Davis’ visit to Groton provided students with valuable insight into different cultures and how our understanding of cultures is essential to a responsible, informed worldview.—Christopher Temerson
Photo by Abby Power '17
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