Barasana people of the Northwest Amazon of Colombia believe that man and nature are one. Their philosophy
of interconnectedness has given rise
to land management practices that minimize the impact of the Barasana
on the environment. In 1991 the Colombian government granted the Indian peoples of the Northwest Amazon legal land rights to an area the size of the U.K. Thanks to that decision, the once endangered Barasana are experiencing a powerful rebirth. They are among the rare lucky ones.
Image: Wade Davis
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Overview
The End
Over the past decade geneticists have proved that all people alive today are descendants of a relatively small number of individuals who walked out of Africa some 60,000 years ago and carried the human spirit and imagination to every corner of the habitable world. Our shared heritage implies that all cultures share essentially the same potential, drawing on similar reserves of raw genius. Whether they exercise this intellectual capacity to produce stunning works of technological innovation (as has been the great achievement of the West) or to maintain an incredibly elaborate network of kin relationships (a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia) is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive benefits and cultural priorities. Each of the planet’s cultures is a unique answer to the question of what it means to be human. And together they make up our repertoire for dealing with the challenges that will confront us as a species in the millennia to come.
But these global voices are being silenced at a frightening rate. The key indicator of this decline in cultural diversity is language loss. A language, of course, is not merely a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Each one is an old-growth forest of the mind. Linguists agree, however, that 50 percent of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered. Every fortnight an elder dies and carries with him or her into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. Within a generation or two, then, we may be witnessing the loss of fully half of humanity’s social, cultural and intellectual legacy. This is the hidden backdrop of our age.
This article was originally published with the title Last of Their Kind.
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15 Comments
Add CommentAll of human history and nature to this point say that for new and better things to come into being old ones have to die. It is true that language, architecture, and much more is part of the human legacy. I and most others will not, however, return to living in log cabins without plumbing, use latin as a mother tongue, sail to China to do buisiness, and on and on and on. The death of old ways, languages, and views is not an end. It is a new beginning. Nothing lasts forever... the hope is that what replaces it is better.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not sure whether "old ones [always] have to die" for the birth of "new" things. Don't we always build on the old to get across or to arrive at the new? To pick on your example, we may not return to caves or log cabins, but they were a bridge to the today's air-conditioned houses. In this particular case, the basic idea (or, in certain sense Plato's notion of Idea) of survival under a harsh weather condition remains the same in a modified, technologized version. What we call new things today will become "old" tomorrow. Sure everything has a life span, but there are certain old things, if not all, worthy of preserving and retrieving. Some of the old things can find new usage. Not everything new is necessarily better, so after certain experimentation we may have to return to old ways on some occasions. Return to or retrieval of the original or first form or any earlier stage as it is may not be possible, but reconfiguration of the past to suit and perfect the present is what we do. Neither can we terminate everything old to start anew from scratch nor is it necessary to do so.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost importantly, everything new may not solve all the problems that we confront today. Some of the old ways are better equipped to tackle today's problems. Take for instance, analog computation. Should we terminate it in the name of digital computation? That would be a loss. An old language as a program may decode something that a new may not be able to. Past is the evolutionary milestone that we build our future upon. It is better to add something new to the old without destroying the old. This is where the example of the Barasana people makes sense: Their cultural practice of interconnection with nature has reduced the adverse human impact on the environment in the Northwest Amazon of Colombia.
Get a grip & don't read things into simple statements that aren't there SDahal. No implications that babies should be thrown out with the bathwater were there. Simply put there is a growth process regarding human beings that continually matures the medium in which we exist and we must mature to exist in that medium as well. We can't 'packrat' everything into the future wether we like it or not. Get use to it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAsk yourself why these cultures died. They were failures at surviving. That is also true of far more advanced ones (think the Soviet Union). Lets stop being romantic about failure.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is nothing more than a conclusion based on the flawed premise that all cultures are equally valuable. Superior cultures will dominate and eliminate inferior cultures, after assimilating the better elements. Get over it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishaven't read the magazine article yet, but based on the posts just one comment...we should store as much information about the past as we can...we should know(or be able to determine) why such and such happened and why at any point in the future....never know when it will come in handy....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSuperior cultures?? I'm not calling u a racist frgough but that idea is very ignorant in itself. To think that ur culture is better than someone else's is pretty close minded. Look up culture relativism. N yes i do understand that western societies r more developed but our culture (as in American culture) has led to the demise of many things, our environment being one of them. So just because we live in air conditioned houses n not in huts doesn't make us any better than our fellow world citizens because every culture has it's good n bad.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery refreshing article. Cultures that dies also take away unused components of world's cultural heritage which is global. Conscious of this reality my father transcribed the lost laws of Bamileke in a French book published in 1999 (Esprit des lois) recently translated "Essence of Law (2010)". Laws were indeed conceived as social safeguards meant to improve with time and to protect us from ourselves. We gain by protecting other cultures. For decades they have inspired us with medicinal plants. They have a lot more to offer. Thank you for this article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlexis Maxime Feyou de Happy
Superior versus inferior has little to no relevance in human cultural evolution and cultural reletavism probably less. Google the premise of 'measured medium' from Gregory Bateson and apply human adaption to the 'intention and entailment' mode of development, as opposed to the biological need mode, and you will find that humans and their cultures no longer follow a strict Darwinian path and they and their cultures diverge more from that every day.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMeasured medium applies to everything from basic organisms to global (and beyond) cultures & simply means that the organism that adapts the fastest & with the least effort/thought within its' medium is the most mature and survivable. Mature in this sense does not mean everything else is of more or less value relatavistically. It simply means more survivable.
The intention and entailment mode was probably a greater advance than fire. We began to define our environment by our intent and entailment (using one thing to do another as an ongoing process) as opposed to biological need. This created the only species that evolves its' environment to suit itself as an artificial process as opposed to reacting within the environment to biological need.
The moment we embarked upon that path we diminished natural process in our evolution and dimish it more with every passing day. Timothy Taylor is right in promoting the idea (which is older than he thinks) that we are artificial apes. His book, The Artificial Ape: How technology changed the course of human evolution, when combined with other concepts and processes common to human advancement, culture, and evolution go a long way to explaining why we leave many things behind and advance the way we do. We defy natural selection as a species and are continually working, as a species, towards a homogenous and mature culture. One in which the 'weak' have survival advantages.
This process is often destructive and much is lost but the 'mature' always survives in some form even if the 'roots' of it are lost to obscurity. Trying to save pieces at the expense of adaption is foolish. Every organism produces waste and being unable to shed that waste is catastrophic to the organism. Get used to it. Healthy cultures excrete.
As did Wayne Williamson, I must predicate this on not having read the article yet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo all who may deny the value of ancient cultures: throw the main circuit breaker on your house to the OFF position. Live on your wits within your defined 'owned' space for a week. Let me know how that works out.
That any seemingly 'primitive' cultures survived the advent of modern contact is a testament to their resiliance. And, that some didn't, does not diminish their culture. Could any of us digital communicators survive in the places that those people lived in for hundreds, maybe even thousands of generations, and do so without destroying the source of our sustenance?
Their science is/was their religion. The shaman, the keeper of the knowledge, was the priest, physicist, doctor, record keeper, artist, musician, grocer, and etc. I would not hesitate to hypothesize that we need their knowledge more than they need ours.
I agree with zi humanity would progress far faster if the language barriers of the world were removed and eventually at some point (obviously not in the near future though) Language would fizzle down to 3 or 4 major languages or maybe even one universal language that everyone knows. However it would be sad to see the different cultures fade out. I say as long as they are documented and are accessible to view by anyone then cultures can't be forgotten.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbout these Polynesians who say can track where they are going by the waves from an island 100 miles away - If you believe that then I have a bridge I want to sell you !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo you want to bet that for each boat that stumbled on an island that at least one failed to reach anything and all died ?
DAG
HE ARTICLE IS NOT FACTUALLY TRUE...PLEASE, GET THE FACTS AND THEN MAKE YOUR POINTS...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTHE ARTICLE IS NOT FACTUALLY CORRECT. PLEASE,GET THE FACTS AND THEN MAKE YOUR POINTS...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou don't need to shout.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this