From Haitian Zombie Poison to Inuit Knives Made of Feces  

Discover Magazine has an interesting interview with explorer Wade Davis that is worth a read - starting with his experiences in Haiti (I've mentioned "The Serpent And The Rainbow" before but if you haven't read it I highly recommend doing so) and moving on to his recent adventures and a pair of films he has featured in that will be released shortly.

On a break from college, Wade Davis, age 20 at the time, crossed the Darién Gap—the roadless, desolate, and dangerous 100-mile stretch of swamp that divides Central from South America. He was clueless, compassless, and on foot. And yet somehow he was chosen to be his group’s guide.

His swagger certainly helped.

At 26 (and still alive), Davis entered graduate school under Harvard University’s legendary Richard Evans Schultes in the field of ethnobotany, where he learned to search for new medicines from the plants that indigenous peoples use. But merely cataloging plants was not his style, so he applied for a doctoral dissertation grant to discover the recipe for zombie poison in Haiti. He got the grant—along with a note from the academic reviewers that said, “Davis must be told he will be killed if he tries to do this work.”

In Haiti the swagger helped again. He won the locals’ trust by drinking unidentified potions in a sorcerer’s hut, winning impromptu horse races, and weaving luminous stories of that improbable land called Canada. He became probably the only white man ever to be initiated into Haiti’s secret societies. And he got the recipe for zombie poison—part graveyard-snatched human bone, part buried toad, part toxic puffer fish, and more parts magic than an outsider had ever been willing to see.

His success brought instant fame. Davis stepped off the Haitian coast directly into a deal for what would become a best-selling book about voodoo culture, The Serpent and the Rainbow. Then he sold the movie rights, earning more money and becoming better known than the professors judging his work.

Ethnobotany’s rock star returned to Harvard and got his Ph.D., but he turned away from academia just the same. “My forte was as a storyteller, grounded in the kind of training that I had in the academic world,” he explains today.

In fact, for Davis botany was “a metaphor, a conduit to culture” itself. With the language of plants offering entrée to the people he found fascinating, he took off with rain forest nomads and wrote another book; he traveled with Inuit in the Arctic and wrote yet another.

In the course of his travels, he coined the term ethnosphere to describe the cultural web that encompasses the diverse dreams, myths, thoughts, products, and intuition of every culture on earth. Preserving that diversity is what Davis desires most. “Half the languages of the world are disappearing in this generation,” he says.

Davis does not consider preservation to be his job, however. “I’m not in the business of trying to save the Peruvian Indian farmer any more than he’s in the business of trying to save me,” he says. Instead, his goal is taking the rest of us to realms of cultural splendor so great that we will understand, finally, their value to the world. Toward that end he works full-time as explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society, holding perhaps the only job-with-benefits on par with astronaut for pure adventure and thrill. As a professional explorer, Davis travels the ethnosphere so he can discover and describe it in a stream of moving and popular exhibits, books, and films. His award-winning two-hour special for the History Channel, Peyote to LSD: A Psychedelic Odyssey, airs April 20, and the IMAX film Grand Canyon Adventure, made in collaboration with environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., premiered in March.

DISCOVER met with Davis in his Washington, D.C., home among the artifacts of his eclectic life: a tool for skinning the eyelids of wolves, a compound microscope, an upright piano, and an ornate wooden mask, carved in his likeness by an old Kwakiutl friend, who told him, “That’s your lips in old age, because you never shut up.” ...

What about your own culture? Have you reflected on its meaning in your exploration of the world?

We don’t think of ourselves as a culture in the West. We think that we somehow exist outside of time and culture. We’re the real world moving inexorably forward: Get with it or lose the train. When the truth is, we’re the anomaly. By a remarkable accident of geography, three of British Columbia’s most important salmon rivers are all born within literally a stone’s throw of each other in a rugged knot of mountains. The only other place I know like that is Tibet, where the Brahmaputra and Ganges are born in lakes on the lower flanks of Mount Kailash. That area is so revered that normally you are not even allowed to climb it. The idea of putting industrial infrastructure at the headwaters of those rivers would be anathema to Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain. Yet here we are about to embark upon coal-bed methane exploration and open anthracite coal mines right at the headwaters of our three greatest rivers in British Columbia. Not only are we prepared to do it, but we don’t, even in the calculus of our economic planning, have a metric for the value of the land left alone. In other words, no company that wants to do something there has to compensate Canadians for destroying something so unique. But we think that this economic system of ours exists out of culture, out of time, and is the inexorable wave of history when, by definition, it is simply the product of a certain set of human beings: our lineage. I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. That has made me a human being very different from my friends amongst the Kwagiulth, who believed that those same forests were the abode of the crooked beak of heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwell at the north end of the world.

Given those conflicting perspectives, how can we ever make a connection, let alone straddle different worlds?

My friend Randy Borman was a young child born of American missionaries, Bub and Bobbie Borman. They were evangelizing the Kofán in lowland Ecuador in the late 1950s and ’60s. The Kofán, meanwhile, were evangelizing Randy. He grew up a blond kid from the Midwest in the jungles of Ecuador in a totally isolated tribe. Kofán became his first language. He hunted with the elders and the other boys. He became thoroughly Kofán in every fiber of his being.

Then he tried to become an American, tried to attend university. He struggled for a semester and then went back to the jungle and married a Kofán woman. Before you know it, he’s chief. Oil pipelines and colonization had swept into their homeland. It made perfect sense to them that their chief be a fellow whom they could trust, who could understand their ways but also understand the ways of the invader and could speak English and could speak Spanish and could negotiate in those silver towers in Quito.

Recently I was in Ecuador and I took ayahuasca with Randy and his father-in-law, a well-known shaman. As Randy said when he first showed microscopes to the Kofán, nothing in the dazzling array of organisms displayed on the glass plate astonished them, because they already knew that multiple levels of reality existed. They had seen it in their visions.

A Tibetan monk turned to me once and said, “We don’t really believe in Tibet that you went to the moon, but you did. You may not believe we achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but we do.”