and one of the delights of ethnographic research

is the opportunity to live amongst those

who have not forgotten the old ways,

who still feel their past in the wind,

touch it in stones polished by rain,

taste it in the bitter leaves of plants.

Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way,

or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning,

or that in the Himalaya,

the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma,

is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology,

and that is the idea that the world in which we live

does not exist in some absolute sense,

but is just one model of reality,

the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices

that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago.

And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives.

We're all born. We all bring our children into the world.

We go through initiation rites.

We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death,

so it shouldn't surprise us that we all sing, we all dance,

we all have art.

But what's interesting is the unique cadence of the song,

the rhythm of the dance in every culture.

And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo,

or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti,

or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya,

the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes,

or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara --

this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with

a month ago --

or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma,

Everest, the goddess mother of the world.

All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being,

other ways of thinking,

other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth.

And this is an idea, if you think about it,

can only fill you with hope.

Now, together the myriad cultures of the world

make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life

that envelops the planet,

and is as important to the well-being of the planet

as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere.

And you might think of this cultural web of life

as being an ethnosphere,

and you might define the ethnosphere

as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths,

ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being

by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.

The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy.

It's the symbol of all that we are

and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species.

And just as the biosphere has been severely eroded,

so too is the ethnosphere

-- and, if anything, at a far greater rate.

No biologists, for example, would dare suggest

that 50 percent of all species or more have been or are

on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true,

and yet that -- the most apocalyptic scenario

in the realm of biological diversity --

scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario

in the realm of cultural diversity.

And the great indicator of that, of course, is language loss.

When each of you in this room were born,

there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet.

Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary

or a set of grammatical rules.

A language is a flash of the human spirit.

It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture

comes into the material world.

Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind,

a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.

And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey,

fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children.

They're no longer being taught to babies,

which means, effectively, unless something changes,

they're already dead.

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence,

to be the last of your people to speak your language,

to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors

or anticipate the promise of the children?

And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody

somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks,

because every two weeks, some elder dies

and carries with him into the grave the last syllables

of an ancient tongue.

And I know there's some of you who say, "Well, wouldn't it be better,

wouldn't the world be a better place

if we all just spoke one language?" And I say, "Great,

let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese.

Let's make it Kogi."

And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like

to be unable to speak your own language.

And so, what I'd like to do with you today

is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere,

a brief journey through the ethnosphere,

to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost.

Now, there are many of us who sort of forget

that when I say "different ways of being,"

I really do mean different ways of being.

Take, for example, this child of a Barasana in the Northwest Amazon,

the people of the anaconda

who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river

from the east in the belly of sacred snakes.

Now, this is a people who cognitively

do not distinguish the color blue from the color green

because the canopy of the heavens

is equated to the canopy of the forest

upon which the people depend.

They have a curious language and marriage rule

which is called "linguistic exogamy:"

you must marry someone who speaks a different language.

And this is all rooted in the mythological past,

yet the curious thing is in these long houses,

where there are six or seven languages spoken

because of intermarriage,

you never hear anyone practicing a language.

They simply listen and then begin to speak.

Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I ever lived with,

the Waorani of northeastern Ecuador,

an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958.

In 1957, five missionaries attempted contact

and made a critical mistake.

They dropped from the air

8 x 10 glossy photographs of themselves

in what we would say to be friendly gestures,

forgetting that these people of the rainforest

had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives.

They picked up these photographs from the forest floor,

tried to look behind the face to find the form or the figure,

found nothing, and concluded that these were calling cards

from the devil, so they speared the five missionaries to death.

But the Waorani didn't just spear outsiders.

They speared each other.

54 percent of their mortality was due to them spearing each other.

We traced genealogies back eight generations,

and we found two instances of natural death

and when we pressured the people a little bit about it,

they admitted that one of the fellows had gotten so old

that he died getting old, so we speared him anyway. (Laughter)

But at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge

of the forest that was astonishing.

Their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces

and tell you what species left it behind.

In the early '80s, I had a really astonishing assignment

when I was asked by my professor at Harvard

if I was interested in going down to Haiti,

infiltrating the secret societies

which were the foundation of Duvalier's strength

and Tonton Macoutes,

and securing the poison used to make zombies.

In order to make sense out of sensation, of course,

I had to understand something about this remarkable faith

of Vodoun. And Voodoo is not a black magic cult.

On the contrary, it's a complex metaphysical worldview.

It's interesting.

If I asked you to name the great religions of the world,

what would you say?

Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever.

There's always one continent left out,

the assumption being that sub-Saharan Africa

had no religious beliefs. Well, of course, they did

and Voodoo is simply the distillation

of these very profound religious ideas

that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era.

But, what makes Voodoo so interesting

is that it's this living relationship

between the living and the dead.

So, the living give birth to the spirits.

The spirits can be invoked from beneath the Great Water,

responding to the rhythm of the dance

to momentarily displace the soul of the living,

so that for that brief shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god.

That's why the Voodooists like to say

that "You white people go to church and speak about God.

We dance in the temple and become God."

And because you are possessed, you are taken by the spirit --

how can you be harmed?

So you see these astonishing demonstrations:

Voodoo acolytes in a state of trance

handling burning embers with impunity,

a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind

to affect the body that bears it

when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation.

Now, of all the peoples that I've ever been with,

the most extraordinary are the Kogi

of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia.

Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization

which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia,

in the wake of the conquest,

these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif

that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain.

In a bloodstained continent,

these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish.

To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood

but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary.

The young acolytes are taken away from their families

at the age of three and four,

sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness

in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years:

two nine-year periods

deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation

they spend in their natural mother's womb;

now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother.

And for this entire time,

they are inculturated into the values of their society,

values that maintain the proposition that their prayers

and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic --

or we might say the ecological -- balance.

And at the end of this amazing initiation,

one day they're suddenly taken out

and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18,

they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness

of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes

of the stunningly beautiful landscape,

suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract

is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back

and says, "You see? It's really as I've told you.

It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect."

They call themselves the "elder brothers"

and they say we, who are the younger brothers,

are the ones responsible for destroying the world.

Now, this level of intuition becomes very important.

Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape,

we either invoke Rousseau

and the old canard of the "noble savage,"

which is an idea racist in its simplicity,

or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau

and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are.

Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental

nor weakened by nostalgia.

There's not a lot of room for either

in the malarial swamps of the Asmat

or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless,

through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth

that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it,

but on a far subtler intuition:

the idea that the Earth itself can only exist

because it is breathed into being by human consciousness.

Now, what does that mean?

It means that a young kid from the Andes

who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit