Tales of the Ethnosphere

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One major threat to global diversity is the idea that North America's culture and economy are the standard to which the world should aspire. "If someone turned the anthropological lens on our own society," Davis suggests, "you'd see many wondrous things. If the measure of success was technological wizardry, we'd come out on top. But if you looked at social structure, you'd see a culture that says it reveres marriage but allows half of them to end in divorce. A culture that says it loves its elderly but where grandparents live with grandchildren in only 6 percent of its homes. A culture that says it loves its child-ren, but embraces an obscene slogan -- '24/7' -- implying total dedication to the workplace, and then wonders why the average American kid, by the age of 18, has spent two full years passively watching television."

Davis cites an observation made by biologist E.O. Wilson that for the entire world's population to achieve North America's level of natural resource consumption would require the resources of four planet Earths. "We are many wondrous things," Davis says of North America, "but the paragon of humanity's potential we most certainly are not. We're just one possibility, one facet of the imagination. But we project our social and economic systems on the rest of the world as if they are the inevitable fate of humankind."

Davis does not believe that indigenous people should be denied access to technological innovation, nor that endangered cultures should be treated as endangered species, sequestered away in parks. Instead he envisions "a truly multicultural, pluralistic world in which every society of the earth has access to the products of human ingenuity, without the engagement in modernity needing to imply the eradication of culture."

As I was writing this article, I felt a wave of despair and hopelessness rising. It is a very sad prospect that entire peoples are facing extinction through the loss of their land, languages, and unique ways of life. Davis recognizes that the challenges are great, but he insists that "it's no time to be pessimistic." While the struggles of many indigenous groups are grave, people will continue to find ways to cope with the pressures placed upon them, and to resist losing what is most precious. Rather than look away, as I wanted to do, Davis encourages us to look clearly at the facts.

"It's neither change nor technology that threatens the integrity of culture," he explains. "It's always power -- the crude face of domination. And wherever you look around the world you see that these aren't frail societies destined to fade away. Quite to the contrary, they're groups of dynamic, living people who are being driven out of existence by identifiable forces, whether those forces are ideological, as in the case of the Chinese treatment of the Tibetans; industrial, as in the case of the egregious deforestation of the homeland of the Penan in Borneo; or the biological consequences of contact -- like the diseases that have been afflicting the Yanomami of the Amazon since the arrival of gold miners.

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