Great Throughts Treasury

"A career is not something that you put on like a coat. It is something that grows organically around you, step-by-step, choice-by-choice, and experience-by-experience. Everything adds up. No work is beneath you. Nothing is a waste of time unless you make it so."

"A simple intuition, a single observation, can open vistas of unimagined potential. Once caught in the web of an idea, the researcher is happily doomed, for the outcome is always uncertain, and the resolution of the mystery may take years to unfold. Such was the case in my encounter with the magic toads of the Americas."

"Change is no threat to culture. All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history. Nor is technology in and of itself a threat to culture. The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow any more than an American farmer ceased being an American when he put aside the horse and buggy in favor of the automobile. It is not change or technology that threatens culture; it is power, the crude face of domination."

"Actual places, landscapes that exist[ed] simultaneously in both physical and metaphysical space...true geographical refugia, verdant valleys dominated by protective mountain deities where people could seek solace as lonely pilgrims, or flee violence as a community in time of war."

"Consider the key indices of the development paradigm. An increase in life expectancy suggests a drop in infant mortality, but reveals nothing of the quality of the lives led by those who survive childhood. Globalization is celebrated with iconic intensity. But what does it really mean? In Bangladesh and China, garment workers are paid pennies to sew clothes that retail in the USA for tens of dollars. Even as fundamental a skill as literacy does not necessarily realize its promise. In northern Kenya, for example, tribal youths placed by their families into parochial schools acquire a modicum of literacy, but in the process also learn to have contempt for their ancestral way of life. They enter school as nomads; they leave as clerks, only to join an economy with a 50 percent unemployment rate for high school graduates. Unable to find work, incapable of going home, they drift to the slums of Nairobi to scratch a living from the edges of a cash economy."

"All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history."

"All cultures are ethnocentric, fiercely loyal to their own interpretation of reality."

"Creativity is a consequence of action, not its motivation. Do what needs to be done and then ask whether it was possible. Orthodoxy is the enemy of invention, despair an insult to the imagination."

"Cultural expressions can be sublime or harsh, elegant or clumsy, inspired or foolish. But in the end, the wonder lies in the fact that all are authentic expressions of the human drama? There is indeed a fire burning over the Earth, taking with it plants and animals, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. At risk is a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination, an oral and written language composed of the memories of countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen, midwives, poets, and saints. In short, the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual expression of the full complexity and diversity of the human experience. Quelling this flame, and rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of human spirit as brought into being by culture is arguably the central challenge of our times. Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the common problems that confront us all. Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world but also of realms of the spirit, intuitions about the meaning of the cosmos, insights into the very nature of existence. This is why it matters that we tell these stories, and make these journeys."

"Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright, anxious eyes as we passed along the rows of sufferers. There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain?s youth."

"Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature."

"Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo."

"Culture is not decoration or artifice. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to avoid madness, to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that history suggests lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach as Lincoln said for the better angels of our nature."

"Heroes are never perfect, but they're brave, they're authentic, they're courageous, determined, discreet, and they've got grit."

"I coined the term ethnosphere in a recent book, Light at the Edge of the World. The thought was to come up with a concept that would suggest to people that just as there is a biosphere, a biological web of life, so too there is a cultural fabric that envelops the Earth, a cultural web of life. You might think of the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, intuitions and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy. It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species."

"I want to lose all harshness of jagged nerves, to be above all gentle. I feel we have achieved victory for that almost more than anything-to be able to cultivate gentleness."

"Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities."

"If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times."

"Human beings as a recognizable social species have been around for what, perhaps 600,000 years. The Neolithic revolution, which gave us agriculture, and with it surplus, hierarchy, specialization, sedentary life, occurred only 10,000 years ago. Modern industrial society is but 300 years old. This shallow history does not suggest to me that our way of life has all of the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us as a species in the coming millennia."

"In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises."

"It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction."

"Just before she died, anthropologist Margaret Meade spoke of her singular concern that, as we drift toward a more homogenous world, we are laying the foundations of a blandly amorphous and singularly generic modern culture that ultimately will have no rivals. The entire imagination of humanity, she feared, might become confined within the limits of a single intellectual and spiritual modality. Her nightmare was the possibility that we might wake up one day and not even remember what had been lost."

"It's very important that we understand the root causes of this collapse of cultural diversity. There is this misconception that these other cultures, quaint and colorful though they may be, are somehow destined to fade away as if by some natural law, as if they are failed attempts at modernity, failed attempts to be us, peoples incapable of change, destined for the dustbin of history. This is simply not true."

"Language is an old-growth forest of the mind."

"Just as the biosphere, the biological matrix of life, is today being severely compromised, so too is the ethnosphere. Only if anything at a far greater rate of loss. No biologist, for example, would dare suggest that 50 percent of all species of plant and animal are moribund or on the brink of extinction. Yet this, the most apocalyptic projection in the realm of biological diversity, scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity. The key indicator is language loss. There are at present some 6,000 languages. But of these fully half are not being taught to children. Which means that effectively, unless something changes, these languages are already dead."

"On paper I would be a rather bold individual in our culture."

"Marsh had travelled on foot to the source of the Nile and once stood down a charging rhinoceros by intrepidly opening a pink umbrella in its face."

"Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god."

"Our goal as I've said is to tell the stories of the ethnosphere, to take our audience to places of such amazing cultural wonder that they will feel viscerally the value of what these peoples offer the world. And we also want to facilitate in any number of ways the ability of these peoples to tell their own stories through words, film, photography and through our Eebsite CulturesontheEdge.com. Indeed my partner Chris always speaks of turning the Internet into a virtual campfire around which we gather to share tales from all reaches of the ethnosphere."

"Race is an utter fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all descendants of a relatively small number of individuals who walked out of Africa some 60,000 years ago and then, on a journey that lasted 40,000 years, some 2500 generations, carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world."

"Our way of life, brilliant and inspired in so many ways, is nevertheless not the paragon of humanity's potential."

"Schultes was a naive photographer. For him a beautiful image was one of something beautiful."

"Risk discomfort and solitude for understanding."

"Sensitivity to nature is not an innate attribute of indigenous peoples. It is a consequence of adaptive choices that have resulted in the development of highly specialized peripheral skills. but those choices in turn spring from a comprehensive view of nature and the universe in which man and woman are perceived as but elements inextricably linked to the whole."

"The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland, the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live out their destiny. Just as a landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place."

"The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations."

"The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence."

"The myriad cultures of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, they are unique manifestations of the human spirit. With their dreams and prayers, their myths and memories, they teach us that there are indeed other ways of being, alternative visions of life, birth, death and creation itself. When asked the meaning of being human they respond with ten thousand different voices. It is within this diversity of knowledge and practice, of intuition and interpretation, or promise and hope, that we will all rediscover the enchantment of being what we are, a conscious species aware of our place on the planet and fully capable of ensuring that all peoples in every garden find a way to flourish."

"The ultimate tragedy, in fact, is not that archaic societies are disappearing but rather that vibrant, dynamic, living cultures and languages are being forced out of existence."

"The true purpose of the space journeys, or at least their most profound and lasting consequence, lay not in wealth secured but in a vision realized, a shift in perspective that would change our lives forever."

"These other cultures are not failed attempts to be us; they are unique manifestations of the spirit?other options, other visions of life itself."

"The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit."

"The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. For those with the eyes to see and the heart to feel, it remains a rich and complex topography of the spirit."

"There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion of the primitive and the civilized, with European industrial society sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement that widens at the base to the so-called primitives of the world has been thoroughly discredited. The brilliance of scientific research, the revelations of modern genetics, has affirmed in an astonishing way the essential connectedness of humanity."

"We have this extraordinary conceit in the West that while we've been hard at work in the creation of technological wizardry and innovation, somehow the other cultures of the world have been intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor is this difference due to some sort of inherent Western superiority. We now know to be true biologically what we've always dreamed to be true philosophically, and that is that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all, by definition, cut from the same genetic cloth. That means every single human society and culture, by definition, shares the same raw mental activity, the same intellectual capacity. And whether that raw genius is placed in service of technological wizardry or unraveling the complex thread of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation."

"To lose half the known cultures in a generation is not trivial. And to have all of these individuals running around stripped raw, shadows of their former selves, free of moral or ethical constraint is to create a very dangerous world indeed."

"To raise consumption of energy and materials throughout the world to Western levels, given current population projections, would require the resources of four planet Earths by the year 2100. To do so with the one world we have would imply so severely compromising the biosphere that the Earth would be unrecognizable. Given the values that drive most decisions in the international community, this is not about to happen. In reality, development for the vast majority of the peoples of the world has been a process in which the individual is torn from his past, propelled into an uncertain future, only to secure a place on the bottom rung of an economic ladder that goes nowhere.We too are ethnocentric and we often forget that we represent not the absolute wave of history but merely a worldview, and that modernity -- whether you identify it by the monikers Westernization, globalization, or free trade -- is but an expression of our cultural values. It is not some objective force removed from the constraints of culture. And it is certainly not the true and only wave of history. It is merely a constellation of beliefs, convictions, economic paradigms that represent one way of doing things, of going about the complex process of organizing human activities."

"What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks."

"When we project modernity as the inevitable destiny of all human societies I think we are being disingenuous in the extreme. Indeed the Western model development has failed in so many places in good measure because it has been based on the false promise that people who follow its prescriptive dictates will in time achieve the material prosperity enjoyed by a handful of nations of the West. Even were this possible, it is not at all clear that it would be desirable."

"You know, once something freezes, it's solid. That's the key to the arctic - they didn't fear the cold, they made use of it."