As the CBC website explains, "The 2009 Massey Lectures are entitled The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Cultures Matter in the Modern World. Anthropologist Wade Davis argues that the myriad of cultures that make up our world are 'humanity’s greatest legacy…the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species.' Wade Davis takes us on an astonishing journey through some of the great cultures and civilizations on earth, fragile and endangered, yet essential to our survival as a species."
In the episode I caught, Davis was speaking largely about the various regions and cultures of the earth that have lost tradition, and therefore knowledge, most often through a loss of geographical standing or indigenous language. It was fascinating that geography and language were so closely tied to each other. I found myself thinking about Gardner's ideas about what he called "symbol systems" and how each field has its own language, traditions and specialized medium (or media) of communication with interesting nuances and challenges. This means that one's skill is tied to his/her fluency in that symbol system. There were corollaries that made such perfect sense as I listened. I should have recorded those thoughts more immediately.
I can't remember Davis' exact words, but a few times he spoke to the idea that losing the land and the language was a tragedy because the stories and languages of any culture were the keys to its knowledge and ultimately to its preservation. Though a mythical tradition may not be considered verifiable knowledge in many circles, it became clear as I listened that it was because it was an art, a creative process. With the loss of a symbol system, skill was lost, another path to creating knowledge and understanding of our world and our humanity was gone. I began to see a connection between creativity and survival, similar to what I'd seen with Frankl's work, but this was on a more global scale. It was a little frightening, to be honest.
