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Saturday, June 30, 2012

Anthropologist in the Attic: Wade Davis on Endangered Cultures at TED Talks

"His research on Voudou in Haiti led to the book "The Serpent and the Rainbow" being published and opened several controversies. One was his claim that Voudou Priests could sustain a person in a pharmacological trance for years. Another was his heterdox behaviour in having a recently buried child exhumed. 

According to his TED biography, you should listen to him because; 

Anthropologist Wade Davis is perhaps the most articulate and influential western advocate for the world's indigenous cultures. 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 6,000 languages, he says, are no longer taught to children. He argues, in the most beautiful terms, that language isn't just a collection of vocabulary and grammatical rules. In fact, "Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind."



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