Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire - Hardcover

Davis, Wade

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559633549 ISBN 13: 9781559633543

Verlag: Island Pr, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Davis Wade

Über diesen Titel

Críticas:

The wonders of the diversity of various cultures and their relationship to their landscape - from the high Arctic and the northern forests to the swamps of the Orinoco - are hunted, gathered, and honestly appreciated here by the peripatetic Davis (One River, 1996). Davis is a sojourner in remote places. He tarries, hoping to get a taste of the intimate, deep reverence for the home place that indigenous people experience by staying put, to sample some of the mythopoetic associations and enigmatic happenings that spring like girls from the land for those who sit still long enough to witness. Here he recounts a dozen journeys, some in search of ethnobotanicals, some to expose himself to the poetics of a particular patch of ground, others to get a psychic education, as when he accompanies the Haitian Vodouns in their pilgrimage to sacred places, both terrestrial and ethereal. There is a good profile of Bruno Manser, a Swiss who went to live among Sarawak's Penan and joined them in their fight against the pillagers (many of them governmental) of their forest, thus becoming "a fugitive straddling the cusp of cultures." That same place, the shear zone, is inhabited by hamans, and Davis has been disturbed and fascinated in many of his travels by these men and women operating outside our familiar calculus of explanation. And as an ethnobotanist, he is drawn to the human potential unleashed by profoundly altered states - firewalking, slowing heartbeats to near imperceptible levels - and the psychotropics that serve as launch pads. One such hallucinogen comes from a monstrous toad that secretes a drug from glands on its head; it seems very handy for a quick slurp, but it turns out that you have to toke the toad to get the best buzz. Davis's lovely, cubist, rich landscape portraits are also topographies of the spirit, conveying a sense of place, but perhaps even more, the music of place. (Kirkus Reviews)

Reseña del editor:

Wade Davis has been called "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life's diversity." In "Shadows in the Sun," he brings all of those gifts to bear on a fascinating examination of indigenous cultures and the interactions between human societies and the natural world.Ranging from the British Columbian wilderness to the jungles of the Amazon and the polar ice of the Arctic Circle, "Shadows in the Sun" is a testament to a world where spirits still stalk the land and seize the human heart. Its essays and stories, though distilled from travels in widely separated parts of the world, are fundamentally about landscape and character, the wisdom of lives drawn directly from the land, the hunger of those who seek to rediscover such understanding, and the consequences of failure.As Davis explains, "To know that other, vastly different cultures exist is to remember that our world does not exist in some absolute sense but rather is just one model of reality. The Penan in the forests of Borneo, the Vodoun acolytes in Haiti, the jaguar Shaman of Venezuela, teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth." "Shadows in the Sun" considers those possibilities, and explores their implications for our world.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Island Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1559633549
• ISBN 13: 9781559633543
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 292