Sunday, February 3 and Tuesday, February 5, 2008 at 7:30 p.m.order tickets
Wade Davis Cultural Anthropologist (top) A monk prays in the mountains of Nepal (bottom) Photographs by Mark Thiessen (top); Wade Davis (bottom)
Wade Davis is many things—author, scientist, adventurer,
photographer, poet—but most importantly, he is a passionate
defender of life’s diversity. Named by the Geographic
as one of the “Explorers for the Millennium,” Davis is an
anthropologist and plant explorer who has spent most of
his life traveling the world, studying the mysteries of sacred
plants and celebrating the poetics of culture. His work as an
ethnobotanist has brought him to the center of indigenous
life in places as remote and diverse as the Canadian Arctic,
the deserts of North Africa, the rain forests of Borneo and
the Amazon, the southern Andes and the mountains of
Tibet, and the surreal cultural landscape of Haiti, where he
documented the zombie phenomenon in his best-selling
book, The Serpent and the Rainbow.
Currently, Davis focuses much of his considerable energy on projects aimed at preserving the
“ethnosphere,” which he describes as the sum of all the “thoughts and dreams, ideas and
myths, institutions and aspirations, brought about by the human imagination.” Central to
the protection of the ethnosphere is the preservation of indigenous language. As Davis puts
it, “every language is an old-growth forest of the mind…an entire ecosystem of spiritual
possibilities.” Yet, of the roughly 6,000 languages currently extant, “fully half are not being
taught to children. Unless something changes, effectively they are already dead.”
Last year, Davis completed a four-part film series, Light at the Edge of the World, which
began airing internationally this past spring on the National Geographic Channel. The series
follows Davis as he journeys into the heart of four traditional cultures that have withstood
the pressures of the modern world.
In this captivating presentation, Davis will share his recent expeditions for the film series to
Polynesia, Peru, Nepal, and the Arctic—places where, he says, “In the face of modernization,
traditional cultures are adapting to preserve their unique heritage.”
For more information
View a page from our hardcopy brochure describing this event.
Location
Tickets
S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium
Benaroya Hall
200 University Street
Seattle, WA
