Light at the Edge of the World. Wade Davis

of their camels and survive on a diet of milk and wild herbs gathered in the shade of frail acacia trees. In Borneo, children of the nomadic Penan watch for omens in the flight of crested hornbills. On an open escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadow of clouds cast upon ice.

      Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention. Our way of life, with its stunning technological wizardry, its cities dense with intrigue, is but one alternative rooted in a particular intellectual lineage. The Polynesian seafarers who sense the presence of distant atolls in the echo of waves, the Naxi shaman of Yunnan who carve mystical tales into rock, the Juwasi Bushmen who for generations lived in open truce with the lions of the Kalahari, reveal that there are other options, other means of interpreting existence, other ways of being.

      Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the common problems that confront us all. Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world but of realms of the spirit, intuitions about the meaning of the cosmos, insights into the very nature of existence.

       2

       The Eyelids of Wolves

      AS A CHILD, I WAS IMPRESSED MOSTLY BY THE cold night air, the ice cracking on the river and the lights of the Catholic seminary on the village point, where the stone windmill stood frozen by the winter. My entire world was limited to a dozen or so suburban blocks, a warren of brick houses and asphalt that sprawled over the remnants of old Québec, a rock quarry once worked by peasants, wheat fields and orchards where priests lingered on hot summer days, dirt trails that followed traplines and the paths of the coureurs de bois, the fur traders who broke open a continent. In my dreams, I wandered with them, up the St. Lawrence River to the Ottawa, past the islands of Georgian Bay to the Superior lakehead, and beyond to the far reaches of the Athabaska territory, through the lands of the Huron and Cree, Ojibway and Kaska. My waking hours were given over to more prosaic concerns: school and endless games of pickup baseball, football and hockey, the seasonal pursuits that marked the annual round for the English community of Pointe Claire.

      When, years later, I returned as an adult, what astonished me most was to realize how small my universe had been and how intimately I had known it. Every blade of grass resonated with a story. Shadows marked the ground where trees had fallen in my absence. Innovations and new construction I took as personal insults, violations of something sacred that lay at the confluence of landscape and memory. Never would I know a place so completely, embrace it with such intensity. Yet the thought of never having left, of having stayed behind as some of my old friends and neighbours had done, left me shuddering with dread. For at its core, Pointe Claire remained what it had been in my father’s time, a bedroom community of harried commuters where the English did not speak to the French, and the French looked across a deep cultural divide to a society they despised. I say this not in judgment but merely to stress how narrow were the limits of my world.

      At the age of eleven, I joined the commuters on the morning train, dressed like them in dark jacket and tie, heading into the city to the first of a series of respectable private schools that taught me too much of what I did not want to know and just enough of what I did. And that was to get away, the sooner the better. A first break occurred in the summer of 1968, when a Spanish teacher took six of us to Colombia. The teacher was English by birth, dapper in appearance, with a scent of cologne that in those days gave him the fey veneer of a dandy, an impression betrayed by the scars on his face and a glass eye that marked a body blown apart in the war. His name was John Forester.

      At fourteen, I was the youngest of his group and the most fortunate, for unlike the others who spent a sweltering season in the streets of Cali, I was billeted with a family in the mountains above the plains, at the edge of trails that reached west to the Pacific. It was a typical Colombian scene: a flock of children too numerous to keep track of, an indulgent father half the size of his wife, a wizened old grandmother who muttered to herself on a porch overlooking fields of cane and coffee, a protective sister who more than once carried her brother and me home half drunk to a mother, kind beyond words, who stood by the garden gate, hands on hips, feigning anger as she tapped her foot on the stone steps. For eight weeks, I encountered the warmth and decency of a people charged with a strange intensity, a passion for life and a quiet acceptance of the frailty of the human spirit. Several of the other Canadian students longed for home. I felt as if I had finally found it.

      Each Sunday, there were dances and wild moments when horsemen from a dozen villages raced over parched fields and along dusty roads where women offered food and teased the riders with their beauty. Though school was out for the summer, one teacher convened classes in his house and discreetly introduced themes that could not be embraced in the open: the plight of the poor, the meaning of a phrase of poetry, the fate of Che Guevara, recently killed in Bolivia. And there were darker moments: the sight of beggars, limbs swollen with disease, and armed soldiers beating ragged children, feral as alley cats, as they scattered into a black night cracked by gunfire.

      Life was real, visceral, dense with intoxicating possibilities. I learned that summer to have but one operative word in my vocabulary, and that was yes to any experience, any encounter, anything new. Colombia taught me that it was possible to fling oneself upon the benevolence of the world and emerge not only unscathed but transformed. It was a naive notion, but one that I carried with me for a long time.

      SOME YEARS LATER, after finishing high school in British Columbia, where my father had been raised, the son of a doctor in a small mining town in the Canadian Rockies, I returned east to attend university at Harvard. When the time came to select an academic major, serendipity played a hand. Faced with a dazzling array of options and with the deadline hours away, I stood on a Boston street corner in the bright light of a spring afternoon, trying to determine where my destiny lay. Earlier in the day, I had happened upon the Peabody Museum and wandered through its dusty halls, past dioramas of waxen figures dressed impeccably in the costumes of another time: Sioux warriors in full regalia, Haida women clothed in cedar bark robes, Huichol shaman enveloped in all the colours of the rainbow. With these images still swirling in my mind, I was approached on the street by another freshman, an intriguing character whom I had met just days before. When he mentioned his intention to study ethnology, my fate was somehow sealed. In the morning, I signed on as a student of social anthropology.

      Sentiment alone, however, did not prepare me for what lay ahead. Within weeks, I fell into the orbit of Professor David Maybury-Lewis, who became my tutor. A man of searing intelligence, whose formal eloquence masked a deeply humane spirit, Maybury-Lewis remains one of the great Americanists, a brilliant scholar who had lived for years among the Akwé-Xavante and Xerente Indians in central Brazil. A student of Rodney Needham at Oxford, he had come to anthropology after earning a degree at Cambridge in Romance languages. His German, Russian, Danish, Spanish and Portuguese were flawless, but it was the way he spoke English that fired the senses. His accent implied erudition. Combined with the precision of his thoughts, the effect was mesmerizing.

      Maybury-Lewis had travelled to central Brazil in the mid-1950s to investigate and, in a sense, celebrate the so-called Gê anomaly. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the first decades of the twentieth, anthropologists had maintained that technological sophistication and material well-being were a direct measure of the complexity of a culture, a convenient concept that invariably placed Victorian England at the top of a Darwinian ladder to success. Modern ethnographers rejected the notion out of hand, arguing that every human culture had, by biological definition, the same mental acuity. Whether this potential was realized through technological prowess or by the elaboration of intensely complex threads of memory inherent in a myth was a matter of cultural choice and historical circumstance. Nowhere was this modern notion more perfectly displayed than among the peoples of eastern Brazil, the complex of fierce tribes known as the Gê.

      Living in the forests of Mato Grosso and on the arid savannahs and uplands that separate the southern Amazon basin from the Atlantic coast, the Akwé-Xavante, Xerente, Kayapó, Timbira and a host of other peoples all spoke dialects of the Gê language family.