THE EARTH AS ONE SYSTEM
Planet Earth: planet as an interconnected web of history and possibilities - culture and medicine
WHY THE WAYFINDERS?
- Asks us to consider how profoundly connected is culture/environment and health.
- Journeys of various indigenous cultures
- Fascinating: window into culture - modes of being human/consciousness for our species; adapt to various environments and develop unique ways of interacting
- Humbling: ongoing disasters of the history of arrogant and dismissal of too many indigenous cultures - last 500 years of colonial encounter, technological acceleration in Western culture
- Driven by environmental crises - we need to look at this - alarming rate we are losing Earth (cultures & language) “the ethnosphere”
- Modernity threatens to destroy the planet and our own existence.
- Davis acknowledges speciesiation: e.g. Latin language and its disappearance
> Dying of different species and languages moving in a faster rate
“Healing Journey” - Anthropological and ecological perspective
- “Constitutive relation between forms of life and the material-cultural environments that sustain or impede their thriving”
- strong interconnection between biosphere and ethnosphere
- specifics of anthropological:
> sets attention to specific set of beliefs, rituals and forms of sociality which we make sense of our experiences of illness and of wellbeing: asset to doctors of anthropological details
> impossible to think without taking account health or illness into the dynamic interactions with the social and environmental worlds through which they manifest.
> insight through anthropology.
> importance of context.
ISSUES IN WAYFINDERS
1. BIOSPHERE & ETHNOSPHERE
- Biosphere: biological web or matrix of life on our planet - “being severely eroded by the destruction of habitat and the resultant loss of plant and animal species, so too is the ethnosphere, only at a far greater rate” (2)
- Ethnosphere: social web of life - “the sum total of thought and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness” (page 2)
- Language loss - increasing hegemony - “canary in the coal mine”
READING QUESTION: WHAT OTHER INDICATORS OF ERODING ETHNOSPHERE?
- Provide specific examples
2. POTENCY OF BELIEF
- Davis argues: not realness of culture against scientific testing, but the potency of belief that produces certain realities for the people/individual living.
- “the manner in which conviction plays out in the day to day lives of a people, for in a very real sense this determines the ecological footprint of a culture, the impact that any society has on its environment” (122-123)
- Reminds us that Western system of evaluation is not objective/the best, esp when it comes to environmental sustainability. (124) “a child is….” mountain to be mined
- How we see the world affects how we use it
READING QUESTION: HOW “POTENCY OF BELIEF” RESONATE WITH “THE REMEDIES”
“songs of healing”
ON METAPHOR
- Metaphor more than a literary device, it is a cognitive device
- Each culture has their own set of powerful metaphors that guide into very real ways
3. THE PROBLEM OF MODERNITY AND GLOBALIZATION
- Demystification of our notion of modernity as the pinnacle of civilisation
- Relativizes our ‘modernity’ of ethnosphere - one-sided progress for Western society - listen to other cultures towards our well-being of the planet
THE PROBLEM WITH OUR BLIND FAITH IN TECHNOLOGY
Page 193: “Modernity, whether….” “merely a constellation of beliefs, one way of doing things”
- Terrible thrive in sustainability, spiritual intuitions and generosity (195)
- “Extreme” civilisation
- Age of disintegration:
> Urbanization (201)
> lack of attention to sustained DIVERSITY - hegemony
> The brute fact of domination - colonisation and “chaotic cultural encounters” - cultures polluted: social illnesses and pollution as a result of that
CONCLUSION
- Matrixes of connectivity sustain our lives - social, environmental, familial - Indigenous health relies on this
- Individual health interconnected to the greater webs of connection, social and environmental health
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