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You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel
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and one of the delights of ethnographic research
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is the opportunity to live amongst those
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who have not forgotten the old ways,
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who still feel their past in the wind,
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touch it in stones polished by rain,
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taste it in the bitter leaves of plants.
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Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way,
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or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning,
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or that in the Himalaya,
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the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma,
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is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology,
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and that is the idea that the world in which we live
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does not exist in some absolute sense,
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but is just one model of reality,
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the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices
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that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago.
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And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives.
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We're all born. We all bring our children into the world.
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We go through initiation rites.
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We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death,
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so it shouldn't surprise us that we all sing, we all dance,
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we all have art.
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But what's interesting is the unique cadence of the song,
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the rhythm of the dance in every culture.
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And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo,
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or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti,
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or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya,
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the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes,
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or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara --
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this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with
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a month ago --
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or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma,
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Everest, the goddess mother of the world.
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All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being,
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other ways of thinking,
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other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth.
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And this is an idea, if you think about it,
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can only fill you with hope.
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Now, together the myriad cultures of the world
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make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life
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that envelops the planet,
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and is as important to the well-being of the planet
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as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere.
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And you might think of this cultural web of life
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as being an ethnosphere,
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and you might define the ethnosphere
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as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths,
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ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being
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by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.
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The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy.
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It's the symbol of all that we are
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and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species.
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And just as the biosphere has been severely eroded,
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so too is the ethnosphere
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-- and, if anything, at a far greater rate.
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No biologists, for example, would dare suggest
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that 50 percent of all species or more have been or are
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on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true,
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and yet that -- the most apocalyptic scenario
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in the realm of biological diversity --
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scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario
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in the realm of cultural diversity.
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And the great indicator of that, of course, is language loss.
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When each of you in this room were born,
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there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet.
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Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary
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or a set of grammatical rules.
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A language is a flash of the human spirit.
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It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture
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comes into the material world.
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Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind,
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a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.
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And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey,
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fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children.
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They're no longer being taught to babies,
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which means, effectively, unless something changes,
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they're already dead.
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What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence,
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to be the last of your people to speak your language,
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to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors
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or anticipate the promise of the children?
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And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody
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somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks,
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because every two weeks, some elder dies
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and carries with him into the grave the last syllables
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of an ancient tongue.
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And I know there's some of you who say, "Well, wouldn't it be better,
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wouldn't the world be a better place
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if we all just spoke one language?" And I say, "Great,
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let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese.
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Let's make it Kogi."
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And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like
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to be unable to speak your own language.
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And so, what I'd like to do with you today
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is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere,
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a brief journey through the ethnosphere,
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to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost.
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Now, there are many of us who sort of forget
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that when I say "different ways of being,"
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I really do mean different ways of being.
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Take, for example, this child of a Barasana in the Northwest Amazon,
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the people of the anaconda
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who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river
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from the east in the belly of sacred snakes.
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Now, this is a people who cognitively
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do not distinguish the color blue from the color green
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because the canopy of the heavens
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is equated to the canopy of the forest
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upon which the people depend.
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They have a curious language and marriage rule
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which is called "linguistic exogamy:"
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you must marry someone who speaks a different language.
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And this is all rooted in the mythological past,
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yet the curious thing is in these long houses,
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where there are six or seven languages spoken
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because of intermarriage,
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you never hear anyone practicing a language.
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They simply listen and then begin to speak.
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Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I ever lived with,
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the Waorani of northeastern Ecuador,
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an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958.
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In 1957, five missionaries attempted contact
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and made a critical mistake.
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They dropped from the air
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8 x 10 glossy photographs of themselves
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in what we would say to be friendly gestures,
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forgetting that these people of the rainforest
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had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives.
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They picked up these photographs from the forest floor,
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tried to look behind the face to find the form or the figure,
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found nothing, and concluded that these were calling cards
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from the devil, so they speared the five missionaries to death.
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But the Waorani didn't just spear outsiders.
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They speared each other.
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54 percent of their mortality was due to them spearing each other.
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We traced genealogies back eight generations,
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and we found two instances of natural death
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and when we pressured the people a little bit about it,
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they admitted that one of the fellows had gotten so old
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that he died getting old, so we speared him anyway. (Laughter)
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But at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge
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of the forest that was astonishing.
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Their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces
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and tell you what species left it behind.
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In the early '80s, I had a really astonishing assignment
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when I was asked by my professor at Harvard
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if I was interested in going down to Haiti,
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infiltrating the secret societies
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which were the foundation of Duvalier's strength
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and Tonton Macoutes,
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and securing the poison used to make zombies.
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In order to make sense out of sensation, of course,
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I had to understand something about this remarkable faith
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of Vodoun. And Voodoo is not a black magic cult.
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On the contrary, it's a complex metaphysical worldview.
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It's interesting.
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If I asked you to name the great religions of the world,
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what would you say?
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Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever.
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There's always one continent left out,
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the assumption being that sub-Saharan Africa
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had no religious beliefs. Well, of course, they did
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and Voodoo is simply the distillation
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of these very profound religious ideas
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that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era.
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But, what makes Voodoo so interesting
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is that it's this living relationship
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between the living and the dead.
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So, the living give birth to the spirits.
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The spirits can be invoked from beneath the Great Water,
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responding to the rhythm of the dance
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to momentarily displace the soul of the living,
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so that for that brief shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god.
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That's why the Voodooists like to say
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that "You white people go to church and speak about God.
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We dance in the temple and become God."
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And because you are possessed, you are taken by the spirit --
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how can you be harmed?
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So you see these astonishing demonstrations:
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Voodoo acolytes in a state of trance
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handling burning embers with impunity,
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a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind
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to affect the body that bears it
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when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation.
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Now, of all the peoples that I've ever been with,
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the most extraordinary are the Kogi
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of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia.
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Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization
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which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia,
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in the wake of the conquest,
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these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif
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that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain.
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In a bloodstained continent,
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these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish.
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To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood
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but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary.
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The young acolytes are taken away from their families
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at the age of three and four,
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sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness
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in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years:
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two nine-year periods
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deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation
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they spend in their natural mother's womb;
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now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother.
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And for this entire time,
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they are inculturated into the values of their society,
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values that maintain the proposition that their prayers
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and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic --
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or we might say the ecological -- balance.
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And at the end of this amazing initiation,
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one day they're suddenly taken out
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and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18,
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they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness
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of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes
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of the stunningly beautiful landscape,
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suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract
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is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back
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and says, "You see? It's really as I've told you.
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It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect."
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They call themselves the "elder brothers"
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and they say we, who are the younger brothers,
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are the ones responsible for destroying the world.
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Now, this level of intuition becomes very important.
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Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape,
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we either invoke Rousseau
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and the old canard of the "noble savage,"
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which is an idea racist in its simplicity,
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or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau
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and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are.
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Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental
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nor weakened by nostalgia.
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There's not a lot of room for either
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in the malarial swamps of the Asmat
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or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless,
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through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth
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that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it,
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but on a far subtler intuition:
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the idea that the Earth itself can only exist
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because it is breathed into being by human consciousness.
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Now, what does that mean?
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It means that a young kid from the Andes
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who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit