TED Talks, Wade Davis on endangered cultures

Wade Davis on endangered cultures

We're all born. We all bring our children into the world. We go through initiation rites. We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death, so it shouldn't surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art. But what's interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture.

And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti, or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya, the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes, or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara. This is incidentally the fellow that I travelled into the desert with a month ago, or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma, Everest, the goddess mother of the world. All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth.

And this is an idea, if you think about it, can only fill you with hope. Now, together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelops the planet, and is as important to the well-being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. And you might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere and you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy. It's the symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species. And just as the biosphere has been severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere -- and if anything at a far greater rate.

Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey, fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children.

They're no longer being taught to babies, which means, effectively, unless something changes, they're already dead. What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your language, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors or anticipate the promise of the children? And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks, because every two weeks, some elder dies and carries with him into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. And I know there's some of you who say, "Well, wouldn't it be better?

Wouldn't the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language?" And I say, "Great, let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese. Let's make it Kogi." And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language. And so, what I'd like to do with you today is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere -- a brief journey through the ethnosphere to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost.

Now, there are many of us who sort of forget that when I say "different ways of being," I really do mean different ways of being. Take, for example, this child of Barasana in Northwest Amazon, the people of the anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east in the belly of sacred snakes.

Now, this is a people who cognitively do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of the forest upon which the people depend. They have a curious language and marriage rule which is called linguistic exogamy: you must marry someone who speaks a different language. And this is all rooted in the mythological past, yet the curious thing is in these long houses where there are six or seven languages spoken because of intermarriage, you never hear anyone practicing a language. They simply listen and then begin to speak. Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I ever lived with, the Waorani of northeastern Ecuador, an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958.

In order to make sense out of sensation of course, I had to understand something about this remarkable faith of Vodoun, and Voodoo is not a black magic cult. On the contrary, it's a complex metaphysical worldview. It's interesting. If I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what would you say? Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever. There's always one continent left out, the assumption being that sub-Saharan Africa had no religious beliefs.

Well, of course, they did and Voodoo is simply the distillation of these very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era. But, what makes Voodoo so interesting is that it's this living relationship between the living and the dead. So, the living give birth to the spirits. The spirits can be invoked from beneath the Great Water, responding to the rhythm of the dance to momentarily displace the soul of the living, so that for that brief shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god. That's why the Voodooists like to say that "You white people go to church and speak about God. We dance in the temple and become God." And because you are possessed, you are taken by the spirit, how can you be harmed? So you see these astonishing demonstrations: Voodoo acolytes in a state of trance handling burning embers with impunity, a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind to affect the body that bears it when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation. Now, of all the peoples that I've ever been with, the most extraordinary are the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia.

Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia in the wake of the conquest, these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain. In a bloodstained continent, these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish. To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary. The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years. Two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother's womb, now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. And for this entire time, they are inculturated into the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic -- or we might say the ecological -- balance. And at the end of this amazing initiation, one day they're suddenly taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18, they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes of the stunningly beautiful landscape, suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back and says, "You see? It's really as I've told you. It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect." They call themselves the elder brothers and they say we, who are the younger brothers, are the ones responsible for destroying the world. Now, this level of intuition becomes very important.

Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape, we either invoke Rousseau and the old canard of the noble savage, which is an idea racist in its simplicity, or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are. Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia. There's not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness. Now, what does that mean?

It means that a young kid from the Andes who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. Whether it's the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant. What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world. I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. That made me a different human being than my friends among the Kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation. Now, if you begin to look at the idea that these cultures could create different realities, you could begin to understand some of their extraordinary discoveries.

Take this plant here. It's a photograph I took in the Northwest Amazon just last April. This is ayahuasca, which many of you have heard about, the most powerful psychoactive preparation of the shaman's repertoire. What makes ayahuasca fascinating is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation, but the elaboration of it. It's made really of two different sources. On the one hand, there's this woody liana which has in it a series of beta-carbolines, harmine, harmaline, mildly hallucinogenic. To take the vine alone is rather to have sort of blue hazy smoke drift across your consciousness, but it's mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family called Psychotria viridis. This plant had in it some very powerful tryptamines, very close to brain serotonin, dimethyltryptamine, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine. If you've ever seen the Yanomami blowing that snuff up their noses, that substance they make from a different set of species also contains methoxydimethyltryptamine. To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity. (Laughter) It doesn't create the distortion of reality; it creates the dissolution of reality. In fact, I used to argue with my professor, Richard Evan Shultes -- who is a man who sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the magic mushrooms in Mexico in the 1930s.

I used to argue that you couldn't classify these tryptamines as hallucinogenic because by the time you're under the effects there's no one home anymore to experience a hallucination. (Laughter) But the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally because they're denatured by an enzyme found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase.

They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction with some other chemical that denatures the MAO. Now, the fascinating things are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question. How in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants, do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants that when combined in this way, created a kind of biochemical version of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts? Well, we use that great euphemism, trial and error, which is exposed to be meaningless.

But you ask the Indians, and they say, "The plants talk to us. Well, what does that mean?

This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca, all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest, all of which are referable to our eye as one species. And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy and they say, "I thought you knew something about plants. I mean, don't you know anything?" And I said, "No." Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key. Now, that's not going to get you a Ph.D. at Harvard, but it's a lot more interesting than counting stamens. Now, (Applause) the problem -- the problem is that even those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful but somehow reduced to the margins of history as the real world, meaning our world, moves on.

The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow any more than an American stopped being an American when he gave up the horse and buggy. It's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power. The crude face of domination. Where ever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away. These are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to. Whether it's the egregious deforestation in the homeland of the Penan -- a nomadic people from Southeast Asia, from Sarawak -- a people who lived free in the forest until a generation ago, and now have all been reduced to servitude and prostitution on the banks of the rivers, where you can see the river itself is soiled with the silt that seems to be carrying half of Borneo away to the South China Sea, where the Japanese freighters hang light in the horizon ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forest. Or in the case of the Yanomami, it's the disease entities that have come in, in the wake of the discovery of gold. Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet, where I'm doing a lot of research recently, you'll see it's a crude face of political domination.

You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally -- in many quarters -- celebrated as part of a development strategy. And you cannot understand the pain of Tibet until you move through it at the ground level. I once travelled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in Western China overland through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa that I understood the face behind the statistics you hear about. 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes. 1.2 million people killed by the cadres during the Cultural Revolution. This young man's father had been ascribed to the Panchen Lama. That meant he was instantly killed at the time of the Chinese invasion. His uncle fled with his holiness in the Diaspora that took the people to Nepal. His mother was incarcerated for the price of -- for the crime of being wealthy. He was smuggled into the jail at the age of two to hide beneath her skirt tails because she couldn't bear to be without him. The sister who had done that brave deed was put into an education camp. One day she inadvertently stepped on an armband of Mao, and for that transgression, she was given seven years of hard labor. The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear, but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold. And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice.

Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities. And it's humbling to remember that our species has, perhaps, been around for [150,000] years.

The Neolithic Revolution -- which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed, the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood, we created hierarchy specialization surplus -- is only 10,000 years ago. The modern industrial world as we know it is barely 300 years old. Now, that shallow history doesn't suggest to me that we have all the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices. And it's within that song that we will all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples and all gardens find a way to flourish.

And there are great moments of optimism. This is a photograph I took at the northern tip of Baffin Island when I went narwhal hunting with some Inuit people, and this man, Olayuk, told me a marvelous story of his grandfather.

The Canadian government has not always been kind to the Inuit people, and during the 1950s, to establish our sovereignty, we forced them into settlements. This old man's grandfather refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his weapons, all of his tools. Now, you must understand that the Inuit did not fear the cold; they took advantage of it. The runners of their sleds were originally made of fish wrapped in caribou hide. So, this man's grandfather was not intimidated by the Arctic night or the blizzard that was blowing. He simply slipped outside, pulled down his sealskin trousers and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of a blade. He put a spray of saliva on the edge of the shit knife and as it finally froze solid, he butchered a dog with it. He skinned the dog and improvised a harness, took the ribcage of the dog and improvised a sled, harnessed up an adjacent dog, and disappeared over the ice floes, shit knife in belt. Talk about getting by with nothing. (Laughter) And this, in many ways, (Applause) is a symbol of the resilience of the Inuit people and of all indigenous people around the world.

The Canadian government in April of 1999 gave back to total control of the Inuit an area of land larger than California and Texas put together. It's our new homeland. It's called Nunavut. It's an independent territory. They control all mineral resources. An amazing example of how a nation-state can reach -- seek restitution with its people. And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious at least to all of all us who've travelled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they're not remote at all.

They're homelands of somebody. They represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time. And for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the naked geography of hope. So, what we're trying to do at the National Geographic finally, is, we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything.

We think that polemics -- (Applause) we think that polemics are not persuasive, but we think that storytelling can change the world, and so we are probably the best storytelling institution in the world. We get 35 million hits on our website every month. 156 nations carry our television channel. Our magazines are read by millions. And what we're doing is a series of journeys to the ethnosphere where we're going to take our audience to places of such cultural wonder that they cannot help but come away dazzled by what they have seen, and hopefully, therefore, embrace gradually, one by one, the central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural pluralistic world where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being. Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Wade Davis on endangered cultures Wade|Davis|||cultures Уейд|Девіс|про|зникаючих| Wade Davis über gefährdete Kulturen Ο Wade Davis για τους πολιτισμούς που απειλούνται με εξαφάνιση Wade Davis sobre las culturas en peligro Wade Davis sur les cultures en danger ウェイド・デイヴィス、絶滅の危機に瀕する文化について Wade Davis o zagrożonych kulturach Wade Davis sobre culturas ameaçadas Уэйд Дэвис об исчезающих культурах Wade Davis nesli tükenmekte olan kültürler üzerine Уейд Девіс про зникаючі культури 韦德·戴维斯谈濒危文化韦德-戴维斯谈濒危文化

You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel and one of the delights of ethnographic research is the opportunity to live amongst those who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. |||||||||||||||ethnographique|||||||||||||les||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||задоволень|||||||радість||етнографічного||||||||||||||||||||||||||||полірованих|||||||||| Vous savez, l'un des plaisirs intenses du voyage et l'un des délices de la recherche ethnographique est l'occasion de vivre parmi ceux qui n'ont pas oublié les anciennes traditions, qui ressentent encore leur passé dans le vent, le touchent dans les pierres poli par la pluie, le goûtent dans les feuilles amères des plantes. 여행의 강렬한 즐거움 중 하나이자 민족지 연구의 즐거움 중 하나는 옛 방식을 잊지 않고 여전히 바람에서 과거를 느끼고, 비로 닦은 돌에서 만지고, 식물의 쓴 잎에서 맛을 느끼는 사람들 사이에서 살 수 있는 기회입니다. Sabe, um dos prazeres intensos da viagem e uma das delícias da pesquisa etnográfica é a oportunidade de viver entre aqueles que não esqueceram os velhos costumes, que ainda sentem seu passado ao vento, tocam-no em pedras polidas pela chuva, saboreá-lo nas folhas amargas das plantas. 你知道，旅行的强烈乐趣之一和民族志研究的乐趣之一就是有机会与那些没有忘记旧方式的人生活在一起，他们仍然在风中感受他们的过去，在雨水打磨的石头上触摸它，在植物的苦叶中品尝它。

Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way, or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, or that in the Himalaya, the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma, is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live in does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||Himalaya||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||Ягуар|шамани|||||||||||||старійшини||резонують|||||||Гімалаї||буддисти|||||||Дхарма|||||||одкровення|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||адаптивного||||потомство|||||| Savoir simplement que les chamanes Jaguar voyagent encore au-delà de la Voie lactée, ou que les mythes des aînés inuit résonnent toujours avec un sens, ou que dans l'Himalaya, les bouddhistes poursuivent toujours le souffle du Dharma, c'est vraiment se souvenir de la révélation centrale de l'anthropologie, à savoir que le monde dans lequel nous vivons n'existe pas dans un sens absolu, mais n'est qu'un modèle de réalité, la conséquence d'un ensemble particulier de choix adaptatifs que notre lignée a faits, bien qu'avec succès, il y a de nombreuses générations. 재규어 주술사들이 여전히 은하수 너머로 여행을 떠난다거나 이누이트 원로들의 신화가 여전히 의미 있는 울림을 준다거나 히말라야에서 불교도들이 여전히 법의 숨결을 추구한다는 사실을 아는 것만으로도 인류학의 핵심 계시, 즉 우리가 살고 있는 세계가 절대적인 의미로 존재하는 것이 아니라 여러 세대 전에 우리 혈통이 성공적이긴 했지만 특정한 적응적 선택의 결과로 만들어진 하나의 현실 모델에 불과하다는 생각을 기억하는 것이 됩니다. Apenas saber que os xamãs jaguares ainda viajam além da Via Láctea, ou que os mitos dos anciões inuítes ainda ressoam com significado, ou que no Himalaia os budistas ainda perseguem o sopro do Dharma, é realmente lembrar da revelação central da antropologia , e essa é a ideia de que o mundo em que vivemos não existe em algum sentido absoluto, mas é apenas um modelo de realidade, a consequência de um conjunto particular de escolhas adaptativas que nossa linhagem fez, embora com sucesso, muitas gerações atrás . 只要知道美洲豹巫师仍在银河系之外旅行，或者因纽特长老的神话仍然有意义地产生共鸣，或者在喜马拉雅山，佛教徒仍然追求佛法的气息，就是真正记住人类学的核心启示，这就是我们生活的世界在某种绝对意义上并不存在，而只是现实的一个模型，是我们的血统在许多代以前做出的一组特定适应性选择的结果，尽管是成功的. And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives. |||||||||impératifs |||||||||імперативи Et bien sûr, nous partageons tous les mêmes impératifs adaptatifs. 물론 우리 모두는 동일한 적응의 의무를 공유하고 있습니다. И, конечно же, все мы разделяем одни и те же адаптивные императивы. 当然，我们都有相同的适应性要求。

We’re all born. 우리는 모두 태어납니다. 我们都出生了。 We all bring our children into the world. We go through initiation rites. |||ініціації| 입문 의식을 거칩니다. Проходим обряды инициации. We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death, so it shouldn’t surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art. 我们必须应对死亡的无情分离，所以我们都唱歌，我们都跳舞，我们都有艺术，这不应该让我们感到惊讶。 But what’s interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture. 但有趣的是歌曲独特的节奏，每种文化中舞蹈的节奏。

And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti, or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya, the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes, or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara. ||||||||||Borneo||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| |||||Пенан|||||Борнео|||Вуду|аколіти||Гаїті||||||Кайсут||||||Курандеро||||||Андах|||||||||Сахара 无论是婆罗洲森林中的本南人，还是海地的巫毒教徒，还是肯尼亚北部凯苏特沙漠中的勇士，安第斯山脉中的库兰德罗人，还是撒哈拉沙漠中部的商队旅馆。 This is incidentally the fellow that I travelled into the desert with a month ago, or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma, Everest, the goddess mother of the world. ||||||||||||||||||||||||Qomolangma||||||| C'est d'ailleurs le compagnon avec qui j'ai voyagé dans le désert il y a un mois, ou en effet un éleveur de yaks dans les pentes du Qomolangma, Everest, la déesse mère du monde. 顺便说一句，这就是一个月前和我一起去沙漠旅行的那个人，或者说是世界女神之母珠穆朗玛峰山坡上的一位牦牛牧民。 All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth. ||||||||||||||||||||s'orienter|||| Tous ces peuples nous enseignent qu'il existe d'autres façons d'être, d'autres façons de penser, d'autres façons de s'orienter sur la Terre. 所有这些人都告诉我们，在地球上还有其他的存在方式、其他的思维方式、其他的定位方式。

And this is an idea, if you think about it, can only fill you with hope. Et c'est une idée, si vous y réfléchissez, qui ne peut que vous remplir d'espoir. Now, together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelops the planet, and is as important to the well-being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||biosphère And you might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere and you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||inspirations|||||||||||aube|| The ethnosphere is humanity’s great legacy. |ethnosphère|||| It’s the symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species. 作为一个好奇心惊人的物种，它是我们所是以及我们所能成为的一切的象征。 And just as the biosphere has been severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere -- and if anything at a far greater rate. 就像生物圈被严重侵蚀一样，民族圈也是如此——而且侵蚀速度要快得多。

No biologists, for example, would dare suggest that 50 percent of all species or more have been or are on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true, and yet that -- the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity -- scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity. Aucun biologiste, par exemple, n'oserait suggérer que 50 pour cent de toutes les espèces ou plus ont été ou sont au bord de l'extinction, car ce n'est tout simplement pas vrai, et pourtant cela - le scénario le plus apocalyptique dans le domaine de la diversité biologique - frôle à peine ce que nous savons être le scénario le plus optimiste dans le domaine de la diversité culturelle. Ни один биолог, например, не посмеет предположить, что 50 или более процентов всех видов находятся или находятся на грани исчезновения, потому что это просто неправда, и все же это — самый апокалиптический сценарий в области биологического разнообразия — вряд ли приближается к тому, что, как мы знаем, является наиболее оптимистичным сценарием в области культурного разнообразия. 例如，没有生物学家敢说所有物种中有 50% 或更多已经灭绝或濒临灭绝，因为这根本不是事实，然而——这是生物多样性领域最灾难性的情景——几乎没有接近我们所知道的文化多样性领域最乐观的情况。 And the great indicator of that, of course, is language loss. Et le grand indicateur de cela, bien sûr, est la perte de langues. 当然，最重要的指标是语言的丧失。 When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. Lorsque chacun d'entre vous dans cette pièce est né, il y avait 6 000 langues parlées sur la planète. 在这个房间里的每个人出生时，地球上有 6,000 种语言。

Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. 现在，语言不仅仅是一组词汇或一组语法规则。 A language is a flash of the human spirit. 语言是人类精神的闪光。 It’s a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. 它是每种特定文化的灵魂进入物质世界的载体。 Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. 每种语言都是思想的古老森林，分水岭，思想，精神可能性的生态系统。 And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey, fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children.

They’re no longer being taught to babies, which means, effectively, unless something changes, they’re already dead. 他们不再被教给婴儿，这意味着，实际上，除非有什么改变，否则他们已经死了。 What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your language, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors or anticipate the promise of the children? Quoi de plus solitaire que d'être enveloppé dans le silence, d'être le dernier de votre peuple à parler votre langue, de n'avoir aucun moyen de transmettre la sagesse des ancêtres ou d'anticiper la promesse des enfants? 有什么比被寂静所笼罩，成为最后一个说您的语言的人，无法传承祖先的智慧或期待孩子们的承诺更孤独的呢？ And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks, because every two weeks, some elder dies and carries with him into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. Et pourtant, ce destin terrible est en effet le sort de quelqu'un quelque part sur Terre à peu près toutes les deux semaines, car toutes les deux semaines, un ancien meurt et emporte avec lui dans la tombe les dernières syllabes d'une langue ancienne. И тем не менее, эта ужасная участь действительно постигает кого-то где-то на Земле примерно каждые две недели, потому что каждые две недели умирает какой-нибудь старейшина и уносит с собой в могилу последние слоги древнего языка. 然而，这种可怕的命运确实是地球上某个地方大约每两周就会有人遭遇这种困境，因为每两周就会有一位长者去世，并将一种古老语言的最后几个音节带入坟墓。 And I know there’s some of you who say, "Well, wouldn’t it be better? Et je sais qu'il y en a parmi vous qui disent : "Eh bien, ne serait-il pas mieux ? 我知道你们中有些人会说，“好吧，这样不是更好吗？

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language?" 如果我们都说一种语言，世界会不会变得更美好？” And I say, "Great, let’s make that language Yoruba. 我说，“太好了，让我们创造约鲁巴语吧。 Let’s make it Cantonese. 改成粤语吧。 Let’s make it Kogi." |||Kogi Faisons-le Kogi. 让我们让它成为科吉。” And you’ll suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language. Et vous découvrirez soudainement ce que ce serait de ne pas pouvoir parler votre propre langue. 你会突然发现不会说自己的语言是什么感觉。 And so, what I’d like to do with you today is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere -- a brief journey through the ethnosphere to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost. Donc, ce que j'aimerais faire avec vous aujourd'hui, c'est vous emmener dans un voyage à travers l'ethnosphère -- un bref voyage à travers l'ethnosphère pour tenter de commencer à vous donner une idée de ce qui est en fait en train d'être perdu. 所以，我今天想和你们一起做的是带你们踏上穿越民族圈的旅程——一段短暂的穿越民族圈的旅程，试图开始让你们了解实际上正在丢失的东西。

Now, there are many of us who sort of forget that when I say "different ways of being," I really do mean different ways of being. Maintenant, il y en a beaucoup d'entre nous qui oublient en quelque sorte que quand je dis "différentes façons d'être", je veux vraiment dire différentes façons d'être. Muitos de nós esquecem-se que quando digo "diferentes formas de ser", quero mesmo dizer diferentes formas de ser. 现在，我们中的许多人有点忘记了当我说“不同的存在方式”时，我的意思是不同的存在方式。 Take, for example, this child of Barasana in Northwest Amazon, the people of the anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east in the belly of sacred snakes. ||||||||||||||||||mythologiquement||||||||||||||| Prenons, par exemple, cet enfant de Barasana dans le nord-ouest de l'Amazonie, le peuple de l'anaconda qui croit que mythologiquement, ils sont venus par le fleuve de lait de l'est dans le ventre de serpents sacrés. 以亚马逊西北部 Barasana 的这个孩子为例，蟒蛇族相信在神话中他们是从东方的圣蛇腹中沿着牛奶河逆流而上。

Now, this is a people who cognitively do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of the forest upon which the people depend. Maintenant, c'est un peuple qui ne distingue pas cognitivement la couleur bleue de la couleur verte, car la canopée des cieux est équivalente à la canopée de la forêt dont dépendent les gens. They have a curious language and marriage rule which is called linguistic exogamy: you must marry someone who speaks a different language. ||||||||||||exogamie||||||||| Ils ont une langue curieuse et une règle matrimoniale appelée exogamie linguistique : vous devez épouser quelqu'un qui parle une langue différente. And this is all rooted in the mythological past, yet the curious thing is in these long houses where there are six or seven languages spoken because of intermarriage, you never hear anyone practicing a language. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||le mariage entre les personnes de différentes ethnies||||||| Et tout cela est ancré dans un passé mythologique, pourtant la chose curieuse est que dans ces longues maisons où il y a six ou sept langues parlées à cause des mariages inter-ethniques, vous n'entendez jamais personne pratiquer une langue. They simply listen and then begin to speak. Ils écoutent simplement et commencent ensuite à parler. Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I ever lived with, the Waorani of northeastern Ecuador, an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958. ||||||||||||Waorani|||||||||| Ou, l'une des tribus les plus fascinantes avec lesquelles j'ai vécu, les Waorani du nord-est de l'Équateur, un peuple incroyable contacté pacifiquement pour la première fois en 1958.

In 1957, five missionaries attempted contact and made a critical mistake. They dropped from the air eight by ten glossy photographs of themselves in what we would say to be friendly gestures, forgetting that these people of the rainforest had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives. |||||huit||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Ils ont laissé tomber du ciel huit sur dix photographies brillantes d'eux-mêmes dans ce que nous qualifierions de gestes amicaux, oubliant que ces habitants de la forêt tropicale n'avaient jamais vu quoi que ce soit de deux dimensions de toute leur vie. They picked up these photographs from the forest floor, tried to look behind the face to find the form or the figure, found nothing, and concluded that these were calling cards from the devil, so they speared the five missionaries to death. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||ont||||| Ils ont ramassé ces photographies sur le sol de la forêt, ont essayé de regarder derrière le visage pour trouver la forme ou la figure, n'ont rien trouvé, et ont conclu que c'étaient des cartes de visite du diable, alors ils ont transpercé les cinq missionnaires à mort. Apanharam estas fotografias no chão da floresta, tentaram olhar para trás do rosto para encontrar a forma ou a figura, não encontraram nada e concluíram que se tratava de cartões de visita do demónio, pelo que mataram os cinco missionários à lança. But the Waorani didn’t just spear outsiders. Mais les Waoranis ne transperçaient pas seulement des étrangers. They speared each other. 54 percent of their mortality was due to them spearing each other. ||||||||se percer|| 54 процента их смертей были связаны с тем, что они пронзали друг друга копьями. We traced genealogies back eight generations, and we found two instances of natural death and when we pressured the people a little bit about it, they admitted that one of the fellows had gotten so old that he died getting old, so we speared him anyway. ||généalogies||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Nous avons retracé des généalogies sur huit générations, et nous avons trouvé deux cas de mort naturelle et quand nous avons un peu pressé les gens à ce sujet, ils ont admis qu'un des gars était devenu si vieux qu'il est mort de vieillesse, donc nous l'avons quand même éliminé. (Laughter) But at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge of the forest that was astonishing. |||||||||perspicace||||||| (Rires) Mais en même temps, ils avaient une connaissance perspicace de la forêt qui était étonnante. Their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces and tell you what species left it behind. |||||urine|||||||||| Leurs chasseurs pouvaient sentir l'urine des animaux à 40 pas et te dire quelle espèce l'avait laissée. In the early '80s, I had a really astonishing assignment when I was asked by my professor at Harvard if I was interested in going down to Haiti, infiltrating the secret societies which were the foundation Duvalier’s strength and Tonton Macoutes, and securing the poison used to make zombies. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||de Duvalier|||||||||||| Au début des années 80, j'ai eu une mission vraiment étonnante quand mon professeur à Harvard m'a demandé si j'étais intéressé à aller en Haïti, infiltrer les sociétés secrètes qui étaient le fondement de la force de Duvalier et des Tontons Macoutes, et sécuriser le poison utilisé pour fabriquer des zombies.

In order to make sense out of sensation of course, I had to understand something about this remarkable faith of Vodoun, and Voodoo is not a black magic cult. ||||||||||||||||||||Vodoun|||||||| Pour donner un sens à cette sensation, bien sûr, je devais comprendre quelque chose sur cette foi remarquable du Vodoun, et le Voodoo n'est pas un culte de magie noire. On the contrary, it’s a complex metaphysical worldview. Au contraire, c'est une vision du monde métaphysique complexe. It’s interesting. If I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what would you say? Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever. |||le judaïsme| There’s always one continent left out, the assumption being that sub-Saharan Africa had no religious beliefs. Il y a toujours un continent oublié, l'hypothèse étant que l'Afrique subsaharienne n'avait pas de croyances religieuses.

Well, of course, they did and Voodoo is simply the distillation of these very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era. ||||||||||distillation||||||||||||||||| Eh bien, bien sûr qu'ils en avaient et le Vaudou est simplement la distillation de ces idées religieuses très profondes qui ont été transmises durant la tragique diaspora de l'ère de l'esclavage. But, what makes Voodoo so interesting is that it’s this living relationship between the living and the dead. Mais ce qui rend le Vaudou si intéressant, c'est cette relation vivante entre les vivants et les morts. So, the living give birth to the spirits. The spirits can be invoked from beneath the Great Water, responding to the rhythm of the dance to momentarily displace the soul of the living, so that for that brief shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||acolyte||| That’s why the Voodooists like to say that "You white people go to church and speak about God. |||Vaudouistes|||||||||||||| We dance in the temple and become God." And because you are possessed, you are taken by the spirit, how can you be harmed? So you see these astonishing demonstrations: Voodoo acolytes in a state of trance handling burning embers with impunity, a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind to affect the body that bears it when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||catalysé|||||| Donc, vous voyez ces démonstrations étonnantes : des acolytes vaudous en état de transe manipulant des braises ardentes avec impunité, une démonstration plutôt incroyable de la capacité de l'esprit à affecter le corps qui le porte lorsqu'il est catalysé dans un état d'excitation extrême. Now, of all the peoples that I’ve ever been with, the most extraordinary are the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. |||||||||||||||||||||||||Colombie Maintenant, de tous les peuples avec lesquels j'ai jamais été, les plus extraordinaires sont les Kogi de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta dans le nord de la Colombie.

Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia in the wake of the conquest, these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain. ||||||||||||||Colombie||||||||||||||||||||| Descendants de l'ancienne civilisation Tairona qui recouvrait autrefois la plaine côtière des Caraïbes de Colombie après la conquête, ces personnes se sont retirées dans un massif volcanique isolé qui s'élève au-dessus de la plaine côtière des Caraïbes. Descendentes da antiga civilização Tairona, que outrora cobriu a planície costeira das Caraíbas da Colômbia, na sequência da conquista, este povo retirou-se para um maciço vulcânico isolado que se eleva acima da planície costeira das Caraíbas. Потомки древней цивилизации Тайрона, которая когда-то покрывала карибскую прибрежную равнину Колумбии после завоевания, эти люди отступили в изолированный вулканический массив, возвышающийся над карибской прибрежной равниной. In a bloodstained continent, these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish. ||sanglant|||||||||| To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary. À ce jour, ils restent régis par une prêtresse rituelle mais la formation pour la prêtrise est plutôt extraordinaire. The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years. Les jeunes acolytes sont arrachés à leurs familles à l'âge de trois et quatre ans, séquestrés dans un monde ombreux de ténèbres dans des huttes en pierre à la base des glaciers pendant 18 ans. Two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother’s womb, now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. ||||||||||||gestation|||||||||||||||||| Deux périodes de neuf ans choisies délibérément pour imiter les neuf mois de gestation qu'ils passent dans le ventre de leur mère naturelle, maintenant ils sont métaphoriquement dans le ventre de la grande mère. And for this entire time, they are inculturated into the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic -- or we might say the ecological -- balance. |||||||inculturés|||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Et pendant tout ce temps, ils sont inculturés dans les valeurs de leur société, des valeurs qui maintiennent la proposition selon laquelle leurs prières et leurs prières seules maintiennent le équilibre cosmique -- ou nous pourrions dire l'équilibre écologique. And at the end of this amazing initiation, one day they’re suddenly taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18, they see a sunrise. Et à la fin de cette incroyable initiation, un jour, ils sont soudainement sortis et pour la première fois de leur vie, à l'âge de 18 ans, ils voient un lever de soleil. And in that crystal moment of awareness of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes of the stunningly beautiful landscape, suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory. Et dans ce moment cristallin de conscience de la première lumière alors que le soleil commence à baigner les pentes du paysage d'une beauté époustouflante, soudainement tout ce qu'ils ont appris dans l'abstrait est affirmé dans une gloire éblouissante. And the priest steps back and says, "You see? It’s really as I’ve told you. It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect." They call themselves the elder brothers and they say we, who are the younger brothers, are the ones responsible for destroying the world. Ils se désignent comme les frères aînés et disent que nous, qui sommes les frères cadets, sommes ceux responsables de la destruction du monde. Now, this level of intuition becomes very important. Maintenant, ce niveau d’intuition devient très important.

Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape, we either invoke Rousseau and the old canard of the noble savage, which is an idea racist in its simplicity, or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are. |||||||||||||||canard||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Chaque fois que nous pensons aux peuples autochtones et au paysage, nous invoquons soit Rousseau et l'ancien canard du noble sauvage, qui est une idée raciste dans sa simplicité, soit alternativement, nous invoquons Thoreau et disons que ces personnes sont plus proches de la Terre que nous ne le sommes. Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia. There’s not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness. ||||||||||malarial|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Il n'y a pas beaucoup de place pour l'un ou l'autre dans les marais paludéens des Asmat ou dans les vents glacials du Tibet, mais ils ont néanmoins, à travers le temps et le rituel, forgé une mystique traditionnelle de la Terre qui n'est pas basée sur l'idée d'être consciemment proche d'elle, mais sur une intuition bien plus subtile : l'idée que la Terre elle-même ne peut exister que parce qu'elle est insufflée de vie par la conscience humaine. Now, what does that mean? Qu'est-ce que cela signifie ?

It means that a young kid from the Andes who’s raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. ||||||||||||||||||Apu||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Cela signifie qu'un jeune enfant des Andes élevé pour croire que cette montagne est un esprit Apu qui dirigera son destin sera un être humain profondément différent et aura une relation différente avec cette ressource ou cet endroit qu'un jeune enfant du Montana élevé pour croire qu'une montagne n'est qu'un tas de roches prêt à être exploité. Whether it’s the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant. Que ce soit le foyer d'un esprit ou une pile de minerai est sans importance. Неважно, обиталище ли это духа или груда руды. What’s interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world. Ce qui est intéressant, c'est la métaphore qui définit la relation entre l'individu et le monde naturel. I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. J'ai été élevé dans les forêts de la Colombie-Britannique pour croire que ces forêts existaient pour être abattues. That made me a different human being than my friends among the Kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation. ||||||||||||Kwagiulth||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Cela m'a fait un être humain différent de mes amis parmi les Kwagiulth qui croient que ces forêts étaient l'habitat de Huxwhukw et du Bec Crochu du Ciel et des esprits cannibales qui habitaient à l'extrémité nord du monde, des esprits avec lesquels ils devraient interagir pendant leur initiation Hamatsa. Now, if you begin to look at the idea that these cultures could create different realities, you could begin to understand some of their extraordinary discoveries. Maintenant, si vous commencez à considérer l'idée que ces cultures pouvaient créer des réalités différentes, vous pourriez commencer à comprendre certaines de leurs découvertes extraordinaires.

Take this plant here. Prenez cette plante ici. It’s a photograph I took in the Northwest Amazon just last April. This is ayahuasca, which many of you have heard about, the most powerful psychoactive preparation of the shaman’s repertoire. ||ayahuasca|||||||||||||||| What makes ayahuasca fascinating is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation, but the elaboration of it. ||ayahuasca||||||||||||||| It’s made really of two different sources. On the one hand, there’s this woody liana which has in it a series of beta-carbolines, harmine, harmaline, mildly hallucinogenic. ||||||||||||||||carbolines|||| To take the vine alone is rather to have sort of blue hazy smoke drift across your consciousness, but it’s mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family called Psychotria viridis. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||viridis This plant had in it some very powerful tryptamines, very close to brain serotonin, dimethyltryptamine, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine. |||||||||||||||5-méthoxydiméthyltryptamine If you’ve ever seen the Yanomami blowing that snuff up their noses, that substance they make from a different set of species also contains methoxydimethyltryptamine. ||||||||||||||||||||||||méthoxydiméthyltryptamine(1) To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity. Avoir cette poudre soufflée dans votre nez ressemble plutôt à être tiré d'un canon de fusil tapissé de peintures baroques et à atterrir sur une mer d'électricité. Взорвать себе нос этим порохом — все равно, что выстрелить из ствола винтовки, украшенного барочными картинами, и приземлиться в море электричества. (Laughter) It doesn’t create the distortion of reality; it creates the dissolution of reality. (Rires) Cela ne crée pas la distorsion de la réalité ; cela crée la dissolution de la réalité. In fact, I used to argue with my professor, Richard Evan Shultes -- who is a man who sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the magic mushrooms in Mexico in the 1930s. |||||||||||Shultes||||||||||||||||||||| En fait, je discutais souvent avec mon professeur, Richard Evan Shultes -- qui est un homme qui a déclenché l'ère psychédélique avec sa découverte des champignons magiques au Mexique dans les années 1930.

I used to argue that you couldn’t classify these tryptamines as hallucinogenic because by the time you’re under the effects there’s no one home anymore to experience a hallucination. Je soutenais que vous ne pouviez pas classer ces tryptamines comme hallucinogènes parce qu'au moment où vous ressentez les effets, il n'y a plus personne chez vous pour faire l'expérience d'une hallucination. (Laughter) (Rires) But the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally because they’re denatured by an enzyme found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase. ||||||||||||||||||||||||monoamine| Mais la chose à propos des tryptamines, c'est qu'elles ne peuvent pas être prises par voie orale parce qu'elles sont dénaturées par une enzyme naturellement présente dans l'intestin humain appelée monoamine oxydase.

They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction with some other chemical that denatures the MAO. |||||||||||||||dénature|| Ils ne peuvent être pris par voie orale que s'ils sont associés à une autre substance chimique qui dénature la MAO. Now, the fascinating things are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamine. |||||||||||||||inhibiteurs||||||||| Maintenant, les choses fascinantes sont que les bêta-carbolines trouvées dans cette liane sont des inhibiteurs de la MAO du type précis nécessaire pour potentialiser le tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question. Alors, vous vous posez une question. How in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants, do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants that when combined in this way, created a kind of biochemical version of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts? |||||||vasculaires||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Comment, dans une flore de 80 000 espèces de plantes vasculaires, ces gens trouvent-ils ces deux plantes morphologiquement non liées qui, combinées de cette manière, créent une sorte de version biochimique de l'ensemble étant plus grand que la somme des parties ? Well, we use that great euphemism, trial and error, which is exposed to be meaningless. Eh bien, nous utilisons ce grand euphémisme, l'essai et l'erreur, qui s'avère être sans signification.

But you ask the Indians, and they say, "The plants talk to us. Mais vous demandez aux Indiens, et ils disent : "Les plantes nous parlent." Well, what does that mean?

This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca, all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest, all of which are referable to our eye as one species. |||Cofan|||||||||||||||||||||||||| And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy and they say, "I thought you knew something about plants. I mean, don’t you know anything?" And I said, "No." Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key. Eh bien, il s'avère que vous prenez chacune des 17 variétés dans la nuit de la pleine lune, et elle vous chante dans une tonalité différente. Now, that’s not going to get you a Ph.D. Maintenant, cela ne va pas vous faire obtenir un doctorat. at Harvard, but it’s a lot more interesting than counting stamens. ||||||||||étamines à Harvard, mais c'est beaucoup plus intéressant que de compter les étamines. Now, (Applause) the problem -- the problem is that even those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful but somehow reduced to the margins of history as the real world, meaning our world, moves on. Maintenant, (Applaudissements) le problème -- le problème est que même ceux d'entre nous qui sympathisent avec le sort des peuples indigènes les considèrent comme pittoresques et colorés mais d'une certaine manière relégués aux marges de l'histoire alors que le vrai monde, c'est-à-dire notre monde, continue d'avancer.

Well, the truth is the 20th century, 300 years from now, is not going to be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations, but rather as the era in which we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet. Eh bien, la vérité est que le 20ème siècle, dans 300 ans, ne sera pas retenu pour ses guerres ou ses innovations technologiques, mais plutôt comme l'époque où nous avons observé et soit activement approuvé soit passivement accepté la destruction massive de la diversité biologique et culturelle sur la planète. Now, the problem isn’t change. Maintenant, le problème n'est pas le changement. All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life. Toutes les cultures à travers le temps ont constamment été engagées dans une danse avec de nouvelles possibilités de vie. And the problem is not technology itself.

The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow any more than an American stopped being an American when he gave up the horse and buggy. |Sioux||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| It’s not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power. The crude face of domination. Where ever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away. Peu importe où vous regardez autour du monde, vous découvrez que ces cultures ne sont pas destinées à s'éteindre. These are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to. Ce sont des peuples dynamiques et vivants qui sont chassés de l'existence par des forces identifiables qui dépassent leur capacité d'adaptation. Whether it’s the egregious deforestation in the homeland of the Penan -- a nomadic people from Southeast Asia, from Sarawak -- a people who lived free in the forest until a generation ago, and now have all been reduced to servitude and prostitution on the banks of the rivers, where you can see the river itself is soiled with the silt that seems to be carrying half of Borneo away to the South China Sea, where the Japanese freighters hang light in the horizon ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forest. ||||||||||||||||||Sarawak||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Que ce soit la déforestation scandaleuse dans le pays d'origine des Penan -- un peuple nomade d'Asie du Sud-Est, de Sarawak -- un peuple qui vivait librement dans la forêt jusqu'à il y a une génération, et maintenant tous ont été réduits à la servitude et à la prostitution sur les rives des rivières, où l'on peut voir que la rivière elle-même est souillée par le limon qui semble emporter la moitié de Bornéo vers la mer de Chine Méridionale, où les cargos japonais se profilent à l'horizon, prêts à remplir leurs soutes de troncs dénudés arrachés à la forêt. Or in the case of the Yanomami, it’s the disease entities that have come in, in the wake of the discovery of gold. Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet, where I’m doing a lot of research recently, you’ll see it’s a crude face of political domination.

You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people’s way of life, is not only not condemned, it’s universally -- in many quarters -- celebrated as part of a development strategy. |||||||||||||ethnocide|||||||||||||||||||||||| And you cannot understand the pain of Tibet until you move through it at the ground level. I once travelled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in Western China overland through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa that I understood the face behind the statistics you hear about. |||||||||par voie terrestre||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes. 6.000 monumentos sagrados reduzidos a pó e cinzas. 1.2 million people killed by the cadres during the Cultural Revolution. |||||cadres|||| 1,2 milhões de pessoas mortas pelos quadros durante a Revolução Cultural. This young man’s father had been ascribed to the Panchen Lama. |||||||||Panchen| Le père de ce jeune homme avait été attribué au Panchen Lama. That meant he was instantly killed at the time of the Chinese invasion. Cela signifiait qu'il avait été instantanément tué au moment de l'invasion chinoise. His uncle fled with his holiness in the Diaspora that took the people to Nepal. Son oncle a fui avec sa sainteté dans la diaspora qui a conduit le peuple au Népal. His mother was incarcerated for the price of -- for the crime of being wealthy. Sa mère a été incarcérée pour le prix de -- pour le crime d'être riche. He was smuggled into the jail at the age of two to hide beneath her skirt tails because she couldn’t bear to be without him. Il a été introduit clandestinement dans la prison à l'âge de deux ans pour se cacher sous les pans de sa jupe parce qu'elle ne pouvait pas supporter d'être sans lui. Foi introduzido clandestinamente na prisão aos dois anos de idade para se esconder debaixo do rabo da saia dela, porque ela não suportava ficar sem ele. The sister who had done that brave deed was put into an education camp. La sœur qui avait accompli cet acte de bravoure a été envoyée dans un camp d'éducation. A irmã que tinha feito aquele ato corajoso foi colocada num campo de educação. One day she inadvertently stepped on an armband of Mao, and for that transgression, she was given seven years of hard labor. |||||||bracelet|||||||||||||| Un jour, elle a involontairement marché sur un brassard de Mao, et pour cette transgression, elle a été condamnée à sept ans de travaux forcés. Um dia, pisou inadvertidamente uma braçadeira de Mao e, por essa transgressão, foi condenada a sete anos de trabalhos forçados. The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear, but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold. |||||||||||rédempteur|||||||| La douleur du Tibet peut être impossible à supporter, mais l'esprit rédempteur du peuple est une chose à admirer. And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice. Et à la fin, en fait, cela revient vraiment à un choix.

Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? |||||||monochrome|||||||||||||| Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||modalité||||||||||||||||||| Margaret Mead, la grande anthropologue, a déclaré avant de mourir que sa plus grande peur était qu’en nous dirigeant vers cette vision du monde générique et amorphe, non seulement nous voyions l'ensemble de l'imagination humaine réduit à une modalité de pensée plus étroite, mais que nous nous réveillons un jour d'un rêve en ayant oublié qu'il y avait même d'autres possibilités. And it’s humbling to remember that our species has, perhaps, been around for [150,000] years. Et il est humble de se rappeler que notre espèce existe peut-être depuis [150 000] ans.

The Neolithic Revolution -- which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed, the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood, we created hierarchy specialization surplus -- is only 10,000 years ago. ||||||||||||||||||||||chaman||||||||||||||||| La Révolution néolithique -- qui nous a donné l'agriculture, à laquelle nous avons succombé au culte de la semence, la poésie du chaman a été remplacée par la prose du sacerdoce, nous avons créé une hiérarchie de spécialisation et de surplus -- date d'il y a seulement 10 000 ans. The modern industrial world as we know it is barely 300 years old. Now, that shallow history doesn’t suggest to me that we have all the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. Maintenant, cette histoire superficielle ne me suggère pas que nous avons toutes les réponses à tous les défis qui nous confronteront au cours des millénaires à venir. When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices. Lorsque ces innombrables cultures du monde sont interrogées sur le sens d'être humain, elles répondent avec 10 000 voix différentes. And it’s within that song that we will all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples and all gardens find a way to flourish. Et c'est dans cette chanson que nous redécouvrirons tous la possibilité d'être ce que nous sommes : une espèce pleinement consciente, pleinement consciente de garantir que tous les peuples et tous les jardins trouvent un moyen de s'épanouir.

The Canadian government has not always been kind to the Inuit people, and during the 1950s, to establish our sovereignty, we forced them into settlements. |||||||||||||||||||souveraineté||||| Le gouvernement canadien n'a pas toujours été bienveillant envers le peuple inuit, et dans les années 1950, pour établir notre souveraineté, nous les avons forcés à s'installer. This old man’s grandfather refused to go. Le grand-père de ce vieil homme a refusé d'y aller. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his weapons, all of his tools. La famille, craignant pour sa vie, lui a retiré toutes ses armes, tous ses outils. Now, you must understand that the Inuit did not fear the cold; they took advantage of it. The runners of their sleds were originally made of fish wrapped in caribou hide. ||||traîneaux||||||||| Les patins de leurs traîneaux étaient à l'origine faits de poisson enveloppé dans de la peau de caribou. Os corredores dos seus trenós eram originalmente feitos de peixe envolto em pele de caribu. So, this man’s grandfather was not intimidated by the Arctic night or the blizzard that was blowing. Ainsi, le grand-père de cet homme n'était pas intimidé par la nuit arctique ni par la tempête de neige qui soufflait. He simply slipped outside, pulled down his sealskin trousers and defecated into his hand. ||||||||||a déféqué||| Il est simplement sorti, a baissé son pantalon en peau de phoque et a déféqué dans sa main. Simplesmente saiu para o exterior, baixou as calças de pele de foca e defecou para a mão. And as the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of a blade. He put a spray of saliva on the edge of the shit knife and as it finally froze solid, he butchered a dog with it. ||||||||||||||||||||a tué|||| Il a mis un brouillard de salive sur le bord du couteau à merde et, alors qu'il finissait par geler complètement, il a abattu un chien avec. He skinned the dog and improvised a harness, took the ribcage of the dog and improvised a sled, harnessed up an adjacent dog, and disappeared over the ice floes, shit knife in belt. ||||||||||cage thoracique|||||||||||||||||||||| Il a dépecé le chien et improvisé un harnais, a pris la cage thoracique du chien et improvisé un traîneau, a attelé un chien adjacent et a disparu sur les floes de glace, couteau à merde à la ceinture. Esfolou o cão e improvisou um arnês, pegou na caixa torácica do cão e improvisou um trenó, prendeu um cão vizinho e desapareceu sobre os blocos de gelo, com a faca de merda no cinto. Talk about getting by with nothing. Parlez de se débrouiller avec rien. (Laughter) And this, in many ways, (Applause) is a symbol of the resilience of the Inuit people and of all indigenous people around the world.

The Canadian government in April of 1999 gave back to total control of the Inuit an area of land larger than California and Texas put together. It’s our new homeland. It’s called Nunavut. ||Nunavut It’s an independent territory. They control all mineral resources. An amazing example of how a nation-state can reach -- seek restitution with its people. |||||||||||restitution||| Un exemple incroyable de la manière dont un État-nation peut atteindre -- rechercher une restitution avec son peuple. And finally, in the end, I think it’s pretty obvious at least to all of all us who’ve travelled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they’re not remote at all. Et enfin, à la fin, je pense qu'il est assez évident, du moins pour nous tous qui avons voyagé dans ces régions reculées de la planète, de réaliser qu'elles ne sont pas du tout reculées.

They’re homelands of somebody. |patries|| Ce sont les terres natales de quelqu'un. They represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time. Representam ramos da imaginação humana que remontam ao início dos tempos. And for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the naked geography of hope. Et pour nous tous, les rêves de ces enfants, comme les rêves de nos propres enfants, font partie de la géographie nue de l'espoir. So, what we’re trying to do at the National Geographic finally, is, we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything. Donc, ce que nous essayons de faire à National Geographic finalement, c'est que nous croyons que les politiciens n'accompliront jamais rien.

We think that polemics -- (Applause) we think that polemics are not persuasive, but we think that storytelling can change the world, and so we are probably the best storytelling institution in the world. Nous pensons que la polémique -- (Applaudissements) nous pensons que la polémique n'est pas persuasive, mais nous pensons que le récit peut changer le monde, et donc nous sommes probablement la meilleure institution de narration au monde. We get 35 million hits on our website every month. Recebemos 35 milhões de visitas no nosso sítio Web todos os meses. 156 nations carry our television channel. 156 países transmitem o nosso canal de televisão. Our magazines are read by millions. And what we’re doing is a series of journeys to the ethnosphere where we’re going to take our audience to places of such cultural wonder that they cannot help but come away dazzled by what they have seen, and hopefully, therefore, embrace gradually, one by one, the central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural pluralistic world where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||pluraliste|||||||||||||||| Thank you very much.

(Applause)