Tales of the Ethnosphere

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"I've been blessed with the opportunity to experience these worlds of wonder, to delve into literature, and to acquire a certain amount of understanding of the processes that are going on in these societies," he tells me. "And in return, I think that my role is to tell the stories of the ethnosphere, to tell the drama of who we are."

Now 50, Wade Davis grew up in an era when "conformity was melting away into experimentation," as he puts it. He was raised in a suburb of Montreal, Canada's most bilingual city, at a point in Quebec history when an invisible border ran down main streets, dividing the French and English worlds. As a child he was intrigued that "right across this invisible line that was never spoken about but never forgotten, there was another language, another religion, another culture, another way of doing things. I kept looking across that divide," he says, "curious about the Other." He crossed the taboo line as a teenager, on the coattails of his older sister, who had fallen in love with a Québecois man, and he discovered a culture that was alive with warmth and a sense of community that was lacking in the world he came from.

The summer Davis was 14, he became suddenly and completely immersed in the life of a Colombian village. A schoolteacher had brought him and a handful of other Canadian boys to South America for a cultural exchange. Unlike the other students, who stayed with wealthy families in the city, Davis was inadvertently billeted with a poorer family in the mountains where he saw no other foreigners for weeks. "Life in Colombia was real, visceral, full, potent with possibilities," he remembers. "It turned out that the other Canadians felt strongly homesick, but I felt as if I had finally found home."

Davis' early encounters with foreign cultures and landscapes planted a seed of curiosity that has grown throughout his life. He went on to study anthropology and biology, receiving a Ph.D. in ethnobotany -- the study of the cultural use of plants -- from Harvard University. But his academic training merely provided a vehicle through which he could live out his life's abiding passion. By learning firsthand how other people view the world, he has sought to "rediscover and celebrate the enchantment of being human."

His early work as an ethnobotanist took Davis back to South America. He spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes, living among 15 indigenous groups. Later, in the early 1980s, he went to Haiti to find the herbal preparation used in creating zombies. In the course of doing so, he became intimate with the mystic culture of Voudon, subject of his internationally best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow (Simon and Schuster, 1986).

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