The Wayfinders (2009) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Quotes edit see section history

• “Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminshes a possibility of life”

  Octavio Paz as quoted by Wade Davis (2009, p.162)

• “In reality, development for the vast majority of 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.”

  Wade Davis (2009, p. 196)

• “To define perpetual growth on a finite planet as the sole measure of economic well-being is to engage in a form of slow collective suicide.”

  Wade Davis (2009, p. 217)

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• Our entire existential experience as a species over the past 50,000 years may be distilled into two words: how and why.

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• Virtually all cultures would endorse most tenets of the Ten Commandments, not because the Judaic world was uniquely inspired, but because it articulated the rules that allowed a social species to thrive.

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• 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 them onward.

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• cultures share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether this intellectual capacity and potential is exercised in stunning works of technological innovation, as has been the great achievement of the West, or through the untangling of the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth — a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia — is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural priorities.

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• impulse, grew as an attempt to reconcile and even re-establish through ritual a separation that was irrevocable.

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• The overwhelming scientific consensus suggests that all of humanity lived in Africa until some 60,000 years ago. Then, perhaps driven by changing climatic and ecological conditions that led to the desertification of the African grasslands, a small band of men, women, and children, possibly as few as 150 individuals, walked out of the ancient continent and began the colonization of the world.

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• A child raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective spirit will be a profoundly different human being from a youth brought up to believe that a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined.

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• A lama once told me that Western science and efficiency has made a major contribution to minor needs.

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• “The real threat to humanity,” Pinker writes, “comes from totalizing ideologies and the denial of human rights, rather than curiosity

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• 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 landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place.

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First Sentence edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Wade Davis (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Writers Trust Hilary Weston Prize (Finalist, 2009)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 301

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Anthropology › Cultural
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Sociology