Wade Davis: Legendary anthropologist and ethnobotanist (Way more exciting than it sounds)

Anthropologist and botanical explorer Wade Davis received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections.

Davis's work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best-seller, which appeared in 10 languages and was later released by Universal Studios as a motion picture, which he despised and is quoted as saying

"Hemingway said that if you were going to sell a book to Hollywood, the way to do it would be to go to Arizona, walk to the border with California, throw the book across and then get back to Tucson and start drinking. I sold the book after being told that Peter Weir would direct the film and that Mel Gibson had been offered millions to play the leading role. I thought it would really be a sort of Year of Living Dangerously movie, something that could have really helped the perception of Haitian culture in this country. Instead, of course, Wes Craven directed. Instead of going to Tucson, I went straight to Borneo."

He is author of five other books, including Shadows in the Sun (1998) and One River (1996). Born December 14, 1953, in British Columbia, Davis is a citizen of both Canada and Ireland. He has worked as a guide, park ranger and forestry engineer.

He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork among several indigenous societies of northern Canada. He has published scientific and popular articles on subjects ranging from Haitian voodoo and Amazonian myth and religion to the global biodiversity crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the ethnobotany of South American Indians.

His photographs have been published widely. Recently Davis's work has taken him to Peru, Borneo, Tibet, the high Arctic, the Orinoco Delta of Venezuela and northern Kenya. A research associate of the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, he also is a board member of the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecotrust, Future Generations, and Cultural Survival-all NGOs dedicated to conservation-based development and the protection of cultural and biological diversity.

Davis's television credits include Earthguide, a 13-part television series on the environment, which he hosted and co-wrote. He also wrote for the documentaries Spirit of the Mask, Cry of the Forgotten People, and Forests Forever.

Davis is currently Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society.

He is a much sought after easygoing and thoroughly entertaining speaker.  His personal experiences are legendary, for rather than merely reporting what others might say their experiences of native psycho-tropic were, Davis himself took part in the rituals, ingesting whatever the local shaman's favorite "ally" was "and not only lived to tell the tale, but has a helluva tale to tell" as Stewart Brand put it.

Below are links to some of this real life Indiana Jones' lectures and talks. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.




TED Talks on Endangered Cultures

TED Talks on Belief and Ritual


Much of the content above was accessed from http://www.rimba.com/oneriver/wadedavisbiosketch.html on March 24, 2010