Book 2 Post 2

Book 2 – Post 2 

For the book 2 assignment, I chose to read The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World” written by Wade Davis.  I decided to choose this book because I am very interested in understanding the way our ancestors did things in the past and guided their lives using nature as a compass. When I read the small summary at the back of the book I was immediately captivated by an urgent call: “Understanding the lessons of this journey will be our mission for the next century. For at risk is the human legacy – a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalog of the imagination”. I wondered, what does the author mean by at risk? What are we going to lose? Why? How? Many questions popped into my head.

 

I haven’t been able to finish the book, but up until what I have been able to read, I have been very interested in learning from this urgent problem the author focuses on. According to him, the web of human culture is being destroyed faster than its counterpart, with language loss being the canary coal mine. When he introduced this issue, I must accept I did not know or understand the urgency behind it. I did know that, as an effect of globalization, people have started to speak global languages like English or Spanish, but I thought it was a good thing. The main problem right now is that we don’t understand what we lose when a language becomes extinct.

 

By reading this book I learned that half of the seven thousand existing languages in the world and not being taught to the young generations of indigenous tribes and therefore, will become extinct. I learned that a language is more than a specific way of communicating. Languages are the core of a culture, of its environmental and ecological knowledge, and contain a huge amount of wisdom. When a language becomes extinct, we lose a culture with it, we lose a unique way of seeing and approaching life. Reading this book, I became more aware of the cultural risks we are facing due to globalization and how we can lose so much. I am eager to continue reading and find out if the author proposes any kind of solution or call to action. After reading about this issue, I wonder what is in my hands to do something about it.

 

A quote I really liked from the book:

“Knowledge is rarely completely divorced from power, and interpretation is too often an expression of convenience”.