Monday, February 9, 2009

Light at the Edge of the World

I did not like this book. It's a preachy book by an anthropologist about how we need to save all the native cultures around the world that are dying out because they have knowledge we can benefit from.

If he had made a case about botanical knowledge that traditional cultures possess, that would be a great book. But his contempt for science and Western ideas is so immense, and his sketchy descriptions of the cultures he mentions are so brief and shallow, I was deeply dissatisfied. He describes people who have visions as being able to see the future uncritically. My least favorite part of the book is when he claims that a native tribe can explain firewalking spiritually and that scientists can't explain it. He's wrong.

He's not wrong about the richness of human diversity, or the priceless knowledge in native cultures and the need to preserve it, he just makes a crappy argument for it. I wish he had written a book about just one of the cultures, going into great detail about all the complexity and richness of their culture, instead of shallowly surveying many. I longed for a book that was as good as Things Fall Apart, a detailed accounting of the many people in an indigenous culture, their ancient knowledge of the nature they live amidst, and the threats that modern society pose. Instead it's just skimming across the surface of some of the places he's visited. What he did was at the level of complexity of a TV show, not a book. (It's good that it also exists as a coffee table book with pretty pictures and TV show, but don't read it without pictures.)

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