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Preface

THIS BOOK RECOUNTS SOME OF THE MANY JOURNEYS made over the course of my work as an ethnobotanist and anthropologist, student and writer. The initial chapters, covering travels through northern Canada, the high Andes, Amazon, Orinoco and Haiti, touch upon those seminal experiences and encounters that led me as a student to appreciate and embrace the key revelation of anthropology, the idea that distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself, morally inspired and inherently right. The latter half of the book, those sections dealing with the plight of the Penan in Borneo, the pastoral nomads of northern Kenya and the fate of Tibet, suggests something of the dark undercurrent of our age, the manner in which ancient peoples throughout the world are being torn from their past and propelled into an uncertain future. The book ends with the redemptive promise of Nunavut, the Inuit homeland recently established in the Canadian Arctic.

Certain passages, those describing the lives of the Kogi and Ika in Colombia, and the sense of spirit and landscape that resonates in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and along the spine of the Andes, echo sentiments from my earlier books, presented here in a different form; the account of the Penan, Ariaal and Rendille first appeared in the pages of National Geographic magazine. Richard Evans Schultes will be familiar to readers of One River, and Vodoun has been the subject of two previous books and several essays.

It is my hope that these stories provide a moving and visceral sense of the key issue celebrated by the book, the wondrous diversity and character of the ethnosphere, a notion perhaps best defined as the sum total of all thoughts, beliefs, myths and intuitions made manifest today by the myriad cultures of the world. The ethnosphere is humanity’s greatest legacy. It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species.

My travels through the ethnosphere have, for the most part, been driven by simple curiosity. The mysterious formula of a folk preparation, and the thought that zombies might actually exist, first brought me to Haiti. The study of coca, a plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality, took me the length of the Andean Cordillera, a journey of well over a year. A desire to understand something of the shamanic art of healing resulted in a sojourn of many months in the Northwest Amazon. A chance to photograph the clouded leopard, rarest of all the great cats, took me to the Himalayas and the Kangshung face of Everest. The Winikina-Warao, canoe people whose feet rarely touch dry land, drew me to the Orinoco delta of Venezuela. A longing to stand in the light of the midnight sun at the mouth of the Northwest Passage and hunt narwhal with Inuit led to the high Arctic and the ice islands that haunt the memory of Europe.

In every case, the scientific quest served as a metaphor, a lens through which to interpret a culture and acquire personal experience of the other. But what ultimately inspired these journeys was a restless desire to move, what Baudelaire called “the great malady,” horror of home. Simply put, I sought escape from a monochromatic world of monotony, in the hope that I might find in a polychromatic world of diversity the means to rediscover and celebrate the enchantment of being human.