By Sayema Khatun, Independent Anthropologist

The very drive to explore and understand other “cultures” is quintessentially Western.

– A comment on Wade Davis’s lecture

From Franz Boas, and David Maybury-Lewis to Wade Davis, the champions of Cultural Survival, anthropology embraced activism. Activist anthropology developed out of the benevolent intention of saving and preserving languages and cultures that are being disappeared and extinct gradually mostly in the periphery of the World System. I like how Ruth Benedict pointed out the entire purpose of the discipline was to make the world safe for human differences, probably it also means to celebrate this diversity with equal dignity and honor for all cultures without the need for being superior or inferior. Wade Davis, as one of the most influential advocates of the preservation of Indigenous languages and cultures, biodiversity across the globe, and proponent of ancient wisdom, used his profound ethnographic knowledge ranging from Amazonian languages and religions to South American Indians’ rituals blended with activist anthropology. He warned the world of the death of languages and ethnocides revealing that, out of 65,000 languages on the earth, 6,000 languages would not be whispered in the ear of the babies in the coming generation. Thus, he advocates for embracing ancient wisdom as one of antidotes for modern predicaments including climate change as present and future challenges for our discipline.   

With my South Asian background in anthropology, Wade Davis’s work came to my attention because of my concern about the loss of languages, being victim of this process, and desire for preserving heritage languages for the immigrants. Over Davis’s long and robust career, he contributed to shaping Canadian anthropology stands out that blended anthropological knowledge with activism for the preservation of marginal languages and finding a way to nurture them. He envisions linguistic diversity as the wealth of human knowledge that had been encountering threats to colonial expansion and globalization which empowers the scholars and activists like me.

Nonetheless, I cannot comprehend what Wade Davis meant by “ancient wisdom” when discussing the living community. What qualifies the wisdom of these people as ancient: is it because those are remote regions for white people? Is it because the Western perceives the different ways of life as “static” or “frozen” in time, thus it is ancient? Despite his rejection of the evolutionary ladder of the civilized world, where Victorian English is considered the zenith, of civilization, he surveys the cultures struggling for survival and intends to save those that might inform Canadian policy for languages and cultures of the minority.

When colored people study the anthropology classics and try to comprehend the theories and framework that underpin the discipline from such a lens that demonstrates how the modern colonial knowledge system captures the rest of the world as “past” “hidden” “remote” “ancient” “lost world” that need saving from decay or extinction, they possibly can view a perspective of their own self that was never seen from the so-called “margin”, their past homelands. Who makes a place a center and a place called the “margin” when the world is round? Does distance from francophone/anglophone civilization define as “ancient” or “pristine”? Possibly the center is the point of the self, of the beholder, or of the interpreter who is essentially a Western spectator, namely an anthropologist. It is yet to go a long way to unlearn the conditioning of disciplinary training founded upon the texts of authoritative anthropological tradition that portray, represent, and interpret the diverse cultures around the world.

In the age of ever-increasing global migration, when the West is being flooded with waves of desperate displaced refugees and immigrants from their former colonies and commonwealth countries as a consequence of the violence of the neo-liberal development regimes, the breakdown of their local internal order of things,  or expansion of military-industrial complex (MIC), actual breakouts of war and genocides, the demarcation of the “other” and the “self”, the “West” and the “Rest” has become obscure, displaced and complicated to draw in the binary oppositional way as it used to be.  Within the framework of authoritative anthropology, and its disciplinary ecosystem, the colored people also acquire the lens through the training of being an anthropologist, holding the status in the scholarship tradition, and it can never become a question of choice of being, but rather, a choice of subjectivity and agency under hybridity of self, whether learning the anglophonic/francophonic system of interpretations and gazes of the western eyes. They lose their organic capacity to understand and interpret their own self, as the newly acquired refugeehood or citizenship, and right to have rights, they become integrated and empowered to interpret their own cultures armed with the supreme anthropological frames and narratives. They do not become perplexed anymore to know the societies and their cultural practices, described in great detail and effort as if we never knew about ourselves.  

How anthropological knowledge can be meaningfully used for understanding the current challenges we are living in as a complex globalized society is always a grave concern for our discipline which often faces such existentialist concerns in the market-oriented education system. The loss of language and cultural practices within this global ecumene has been an even more serious issue than ever. As a practitioner in anthropology with a South Asian orientation, I always felt the urge to find what can be done for the ongoing marginalization of languages and cultures in increasing the global migration and expansion of Western cultural hegemony. The death valley of cultures and the graveyards of language and culture have expanded the horizon, not only in the geographical West, but rather, within the very post-colonial regions under aggressive neo-liberal development regimes, previous organically multi-cultural fabrics of the societies have been permanently damaged with the emergence of binary identities and subjectivities of modern knowledge system.