Cultural Cannibalism
How the world is eating itself up until there will be nothing but one thing left.
One thing that I have always been turned on by, fascinated with, gobsmacked by is the exploration and understanding of other ways of living and being.
Give me a great documentary, a Nat Geo magazine, a story from a traveler about a faraway place and I’m there. You got my attention. I’m a listener. It’s why I ended up studying Anthropology, not just at university but in this school of life, the halls we roam each day.
One of my fav. talks about the importance of ethnic diversity and the incredible cultural genome that is so important to our survival on this planet is this one by Wade Davis. He speaks with an urgency and passion that reflects how serious the situation truly has become. He tells us about the “ethnosphere” where diversity is fundamental to humankind’s health. Since this talk - over 1,000 languages have completely disappeared. And that is the death knell for a culture, a way of seeing and being. We are eating ourselves.
What causes this process of devouring ourselves? There are many “pushes” but the overall reason cultures die and disappear on this planet is the economic barbarism that Western (I hate to use the word developed) nations use across the globe. Not one inch of cultural territory is safe anymore. I have written elsewhere and will post in this journal, several essays over the years I’ve written about this process I call “modernity”. The religion of higher, bigger, faster, money and more …
We are modern cannibals. We are eating up every damn inch of this planet. Clearing forests, remapping national parks, eating up mountains for minerals, devouring lakes and rivers, sucking out gas, coal and oil from the guts of our planet, destroying millennia-old cultures and languages. And it is all so dumb because the earth IS us. That is why we are cannibals.
I’ve never liked the “mother earth” metaphor for some reason. It makes the earth seem not a part of us. We are the earth. We exist in it as one organ, cancerous though we be. And it is up to us to cure ourselves and get back to our natural functioning within the body of the earth.
And meanwhile, we hold conferences, set goals and blablabla - but really our thirst, need, addiction to money is and will be our downfall. We will eventually get to empty.
Empty means something more than just “nothing”. Empty means a monoculture. Empty of “the other”. No ethno-diversity. We all just sit on the couch, eat Doritos, watch football and seek ways to get money to keep comfortable. That’s it in a nutshell.
Watch this subtle and beautiful documentary of one year in the life of the dying Karnak people of the Indian Ladakh region of the Himalayan mountains. Now only 4 families are left as they are being devoured by “the town” where they need to go to survive as poor, destitute construction laborers in search of dollars. There are so many lessons about how important the ethnosphere is - in this short film. Watch it and think about the cost of your cashmere sweater in the closet.
And notice how the people smile! That is what I’ve noticed in my journey on planet earth - how happy people are just living with earth, not against the earth. Always laughing, always full of life. We in the west are the ones who are poor. We are the cannibals.