Wade Davis calls the title on his National Geographic business card, that of Explorer-in-Residence, an ‘oxymoronic sinecure’. Whatever that means. When you are as worldy, as well-spoken and as educated as Davis is, you can trust his word on just about anything.
The Canadian-born cultural anthropologist has investigated zombies in Haiti, lived with tribes in the Amazon and Andes, and explored vanishing indigenous cultures from Borneo to east Africa, and has recently penned a new book (his 15th) called Into the Silence.
A major element of the book is that for the first time it tells the story from the side of the Sherpas, the people living in the high mountain region of the eastern Himalaya. While well adapted to life at high altitude, the Sherpas of the 1920s were not the mountain-climbing experts they are known as today. Their beliefs about the physical and spiritual landscape put a premium on humans thriving in more temperate areas. The extreme conditions, remoteness, and danger of mountains kept them for heavenly beings. “ Surprisingly,” says Wade, “[the nearby people of Tibet] saw Everest as a place you’d be a fool to go.” It was Mallory and his team who “taught the Sherpas how to walk on ice and scale icy mountain sides,” he adds, “a practice the Sherpas have maintained even to this day.
Wade Davis on endangered cultures from TEDTalks on Vimeo.
