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Thursday, May 24, 2012

Wade Davis: Dreams From Endangered Cultures

This is a wonderful presentation. An interesting story for me is related to the lack of experience with two-dimension. Davis tells a story when missionaries released photographs of themselves from the sky, the tribe was unaware of two-dimension, the photograph as object was foreign, never experienced, the tribe considered the individuals sent from the devil and therefore the missionaries were murdered upon arrival.





"Wade Davis is perhaps the most articulate and influential western advocate for the world's indigenous cultures. A National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” Trained in anthropology and botany at Harvard, he travels the globe to live alongside indigenous people, and document their cultural practices in books, photographs, and film. His stunning photographs and evocative stories capture the viewer's imagination. As a speaker, he parlays that sense of wonder into passionate concern over the rate at which cultures and languages are disappearing -- 50 percent of the world's 7,000 languages, he says, are no longer taught to children. He argues, in the most beautiful terms, that language is much more than vocabulary and grammatical rules. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind." - source is TED.  link here



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