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    The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
    The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
    The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

    Written by Wade Davis

    Narrated by Tom Perkins

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    About this audiobook

    Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures.

    In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true lost civilization, the Peoples of the Anaconda. In the Andes we discover that the earth really is alive, while in Australia we experience Dreamtime, the all-embracing philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa. We then travel to Nepal, where we encounter a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, who emerges from forty-five years of Buddhist retreat and solitude. And finally we settle in Borneo, where the last rain forest nomads struggle to survive.

    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. Rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit, as expressed by culture, is among the central challenges of our time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 8, 2017
    ISBN9781541476912

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    Reviews for The Wayfinders

    4/5

    113 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A must-read for everyone! I'm out of words. This isn't a book. This is one man's pilgrimage to remote corners of the world in search dying ancient wisdom. It introduces you to profound indigenous cultures of unheard places. From Polynesia to the Sahara, from Amazon to the Arctic, this book will take you where even your imagination fails to reach. Please read this book for the world we inhabit
    • 5/5
      Great book. I am sure people will learn a lot of things here how our ancestors learn to live with nature, and in their respective environments. Some facts were also not mentioned in other books, how some colonizers exploited the natives.
    • 4/5
      Very eye-opening book on the wisdom of other cultures and our western hubris in ignoring them. Mostly absorbing, but he goes on a little too long in some spots. Very worthwhile.
    • 4/5
      A really lovely reflection on what indigenous cultures have to offer Western civilization.
    • 4/5
      Big and deep, too much for one reading. I think I need to buy this one. (Got it out of the library - always my first choice)
    • 5/5
      Highly recommend this book. So eloquently written - opened my heart and mind.
    • 4/5
      This is a wide-ranging and interesting discussion by anthropologist Wade Davis on various cultures from all over the world and what they may be able to teach us before they are wiped out by the inexorable march of our technology- and energy-driven “modern” society. The book’s origins as a series of lectures for the CBC do show through and give it more of an anecdotal style rather than the reasoned academic exposition the reader might expect. I found, however, that the author’s repeated laments over the destruction of languages and cultures gave the book a bit of a whiny tone. He never addresses the root problem, which is that if you are going to support six or seven billion people on the planet, you are going to end up with a much different relationship between humans and their environment than you had when there were only a million hunter-gatherers or a few hundred million farmers. Many (although not all) of the “other” cultures he discusses made sustainable use of the resources around them, but most were also sparse upon the land in terms of numbers. But even with our bloated population, there are lessons here that would help us make better use of the resources we need to survive.
    • 5/5
      Also touching upon language but including multiple cultures and obscure cultural techniques and "other ways of knowing" such as polynesian navigation, ayhuasca etc.Wonderful book. Easy to read but dense. Should be twice as thick and go more into detail.
    • 4/5
      After a poor series in 2008, I was worried that the 2009 Masseys would be disappointing as well. Fortunately, they're back to the quality that I've come to expect from them.The first four lectures in this book describe different cultures, including the bushmen of the Kalahari, Polynesians wayfinders, and South American "Amazons". Each lecture is interesting in and of itself but the book's secondary title, "Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World" is only brought to the foreground in the final lecture, which ties the lectures together more cohesively and puts out a call to action for their preservation.