Dreams from the Ethnosphere

Plains Cree Man from "The Plains Cree: an ethnographic, historical and comparative study" by David G. Mandelbaum

"And in the end then it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity?

Margaret Meade, the great anthropologist said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted to this blandly amorphous, generic worldview, not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow and more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten that there were even other possibilities.

And it's humbling to remember that our species has perhaps been around for 600,000 years, the neolithic revolution, which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed; the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood, we created hierarchy, specialization, surplus is only ten thousand years ago, the modern industrial world as we know it is barely three hundred years old. Now that shallow history doesn't suggest to me that we have all the answers for all the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millenia.

When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human they respond with 10,000 different voices. And it is within that song that we all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples in all gardens find a way to flourish."

from Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures, a TED talk ( http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html#.Tswyaa16evc.facebook )