Wade Davis on Endangered Cultures

This debut post is a lecture given in 2003 by anthropologist Wade Davis, whose work focuses on indigenous cultures around the world. In his own terms, Davis describes the collective cultural network of the world as an "ethnosphere," which, as he goes on to say, is being eroded at an alarming rate. And he specifically notes that a great indicator of this decline is language death. For me, the sentiment conveyed here is directly parallel to my intentions for this blog. At the end of his lecture, Davis maintains that storytelling will be our best effort for the revival of endangered cultures. In this vein, I'd like to think of my blog entries as a storybook of human culture as it is captured by language.