Hello for the eager eyed amongst you, you might've noticed this episode is a week late. We decided against posting this last week because of the turmoil around the US election. And we also felt it was appropriate to share it this week in the aftermath of that election, because this episode tries to grapple with some of the fundamental issues underneath our increasingly divided and tribal political landscape, in the US and arguably around the world.
So I hope you take something from this episode, as we reflect on what our global consciousness is going through and where we might want to take it in the future.
Wade Davis - We are all descendants of the same handful of people who walked out of Africa 70,000 years ago. Therefore every culture shares the same genes. And there is no hierarchy in the affairs of culture. The other peoples of the world aren't failed attempts at being you. We all know we must change the fundamental way in which we inhabit this planet. Every culture has something to say. Each deserves to be heard. There are other options.
Chief Nixiewake - Our culture brings out the traditional, but also the modernity. The modern is represented by the new musical instruments, the new dances, the way we make our rituals. And also represented by the women empowerment.
Vanessa Nakate - In my country and in my culture, they name people after animals, they name people after plants, they name people after trees, they name people after fish. So this was a system that was put in place in order to protect everything that connects to nature.
Sam Lee - The work is for me is, is about deep listening. And this is something that as a people, we have lost the art of. Spending hours in the company of somebody sharing their life and their songs and listening to them slowly tell this world.
Lily Cole: At the heart of every issue that intersects with the environment you find contradictions tensions and divergent perspectives, and these issues are complex and changing. Most of us want a happy life and a healthy planet. But many people have different ideas about the right way to travel towards it. In this new podcast series, I'll be sharing parts of my research from my book Who Cares Wins, interviewing some of the leading and conflicting voices in contemporary debates, such as technology, food, gender, politics and looking at how they intersect with our environment.
I see myself a bit like sellotape, ribbon or string holding together divergent voices and sort of asking, ‘who cares who wins?’
In this episode I will speak to an anthropologist, indigenous communities and a folk song collector, to try and better understand the cultural, political and social forces that have shaped our present system. And I'll also explore alternative visions that we might take inspiration from.
System change is often chanted like a mantra, but what exactly does the system mean? The roots of our system run much deeper than the laws and the institutions we've built. These structures emerge as symptoms in the collective stories we tell and retell ourselves. Instead it is the values, metaphors and beliefs that fundamentally underpin our society's relationship with the world. And these beliefs are constantly shifting.
Whether, for example, we believe that most human beings are good and to be trusted or are barbaric people to be civilised. Whether we believe in a natural hierarchy between species or even between people or whether we believe hierarchy is something culturally imposed on difference. Whether we believe we owe our fidelity to the Earth or that the Earth is ours to own. Whether we believe in the American dream, or whether we listen to the dreams of the people who've lived for tens of thousands of years on the land that we now call America.
The anthropologist Wade Davis sees the confluence of the Trump presidency and COVID as a historical turning point for the world in terms of the shift of empire. Wade has dedicated his life to documenting and trying to understand the breadth of cultures around the world, sharing his insights through books such as One River, The Wayfinders, Into the Silence, and most recently, Magdalena.
In response to the COVID crisis, Wade wrote an article that was quickly shared hundreds of millions of times titled, The unraveling of America, which explored this moment we find ourselves in and what it might mean for our future.
Wade Davis: You know I had been asked to speak about COVID by many people. And I didn't really feel I had anything novel to say until I kind of just realised that COVID was not a story of medicine at all, but it wasn't really a story of healthcare, even morbidity and mortality. It was really a story of culture.
Lily Cole: In what sense?
WD: Well, in the sense that the long-term impacts of it were to be cultural and historic. The adaptations that the COVID reality we're going to call for and provoke, all these were just petty inconveniences that we would readily adapt to. But what will not change was, I sensed, was the absolute devastating impact this would have, the kind of catalytic impact, it would have historically on the balance of power in the world. And it struck me that this was the unraveling of America.
Americans woke up to the fact that 2000 of them were dying a day. They were living in a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional government at the helm of which was a kind of buffoon of a president, who was advocating the use of disinfectants to treat a life-threatening pandemic disease that he intellectually could not begin to understand. And as frontline workers at healthcare centres across the country awaited emergency air lifts of fundamental supplies from China, the hinge of history kind of opened to the Asian century.
LC: And so you feel very confident that this will be the kind of, the linchpin in essentially the Empire moving back towards China.
WD: All empires are born to die. Every kingdom fails to anticipate its own demise. I mean, you know, the 15th century belongs to the Portuguese, the 16th to the Spanish, the 17th to the Dutch, the 18th to the French, the 19th to the British and clearly the 20th to the Americans. I mean, the British empire, for example, reached its greatest geographical extent as late as 1935. You know, Brits were swirling their gin and tonics in clubs all over the world in that year, quite unaware that the empire probably had faded by the Diamond Jubilee, in a serious way.
By 1935, unbeknownst to the British, the torch of history had clearly passed to the hands of America. In 1940, for example, the United States was in fact a demilitarised society. Portugal and Bulgaria both had bigger armies. The country reversed itself, and overnight became the true arsenal of democracy as president Roosevelt promised. And it really did save civilisation as we know it. Russian blood and industrial might of America.
The scale of that might Lily is simply hard for people to believe today. The Detroit arsenal, one factory owned by Chrysler, produced more tanks than the entire German Third Reich. And in the wake of the war, with Europe in ashes and Japan prostrate, the Americans with but 4% of the global population generated 2% of the world's economy making 9% or more of the world's automobiles and that incredible affluence and dominance allowed for a treaty between capital and labour that gave us a weekend. That gave us a working middle-class.
The idea that a man with limited education could support a family, buy a house, buy a car, look forward to his kids going to good schools, schools, incidentally, that were brilliant in part because of the subservience of women. You know, young women of even your generation, Lily, that they forget that it really was true. That in the 1950s, the only opportunities for women were teaching, secretarial, nursing. And so our schools were led by women who today would be running corporations or serving on the bar or on the bench.
And then vibrant middle-class was also based on an economic system, even though it's often said to have been a golden age of American capitalism, it resembled Denmark more than the America of today. You know, there's a 91% marginal tax rate for the wealthy. The average CEO, including my father-in-law, who at that time led Bell and Howell company, a big camera maker, his salary would have been maybe 20 times that of one of his white collared staff employees.
Well, today that chasm would be more like 500 times. And today the top 1% control, $30 trillion of assets and the lower half of the American people have more debt than assets. The top three celebrity billionaires have more wealth than the lower 160 million Americans altogether. And so one of the things that broke down was that social contract, that promise of America and the roots of all of America's dilemmas today are less political than issues of fairness.
There's a deep sense in those, for example, who support President Trump, that life has been unfair. Something's been taken from them, which is one of the reasons that the economic frustration is conflated with resentment, for the very social movements that grew out of the 1950s, that most of us would think of as being very progressive. Whether it was the fact that women went from the kitchen to the boardroom, people of colour went from the woodshed to the white house, gay people from the closet to the altar.
So even as America came out of WW2, celebrating the individual with this incredible excitement, that kind of image of Jack Kerouac on the open road, which gave us all this sort of sense of freedom and mobility. It also meant the progressive breakdown of community. We on the Left don't necessarily like to acknowledge it, but the family went to hell, divorce rates soared over 50%, obsession with the workplace and career, slogans like 24/7 meant that children are left at home.
America in decline consumed two thirds of the world's anti psychotic antidepressant drugs. The highest cause of death for those Americans under 50 today is not automobile accidents as it always was, but abuse of drugs, meth, crystal meth, and opiates in particular. A country that has come to define freedom as the individual's right to possess a personal arsenal of weaponry, trumping even the safety of children and the litany goes on.
And, you know, out of that came a gradual breakdown of the sense of community. The building of the wall along the Mexican border, which is sort of seen as a sort of act of patriotism by certain Americans, if you really think about it, is an act of treason because what is treason? It’s not simply the sharing of state secrets with a mortal enemy. It's acts that betray the very heart, soul and strength of a nation. Those words carved onto the base of the statue of Liberty really do mean something, to bring us your huddled masses. Well, when the huddled masses arrive at the American border today, their children are taken away from their mothers, placed in cages.
Even the Trump administration admitted that 546 young children have not been able to be found, who were separated from their parents. I mean, what does that say about the America of today? Nothing that I write in this article is anti-American, you know, I was born Canadian. I'm Irish, I'm Colombian, but I also chose to be an American and I married an American. My father-in-law was almost US president. He turned it down when Nixon offered him the vice presidency. My own son-in-law is on active duty as I speak for the US military overseas. I mean he's a soldier among many soldiers in 170 countries in the world. And again, this is one of the challenges for America. After World War two, it did continue to fight an essential cold war.
Since 1975 China's never gone to war, America’s never been at peace. Trying to build its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the 20th century. And the reason COVID becomes so important is that it revealed all of this and it revealed the fundamental feelings of the American obsession with the individual.
In Canada, we still recognise that wealth is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but the strength of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all of us in common purpose. I think the Irish Times put it best when they said, you know, since World War Two, there have been many emotions expressed about the United States, but the one that has not been expressed is pity. And now when most of us from vantage point of Canada or Europe, look to America, that becomes kind of a sad, pitiful lament of nostalgia for an America that once was. An America that literally did save the world.
LC: Would it be fair to say that you think a large part of the demise of the American empire, as you understand it, is down to the emphasis on the individual, over the community?
WD: Well, one of the things Lily, that was so fascinating when this Rolling Stone piece came out, you know, unexpectedly, it hit a viral nerve and 362 million social media impressions around the internet. And the response was sort of twofold predictably, right down the middle. From one side, a kind of a deep lament, a kind of a sadness. And at the same time, a kind of determination to see how America could be set right. And from the other side, even from individuals, so you can sort of tell by the grammar of their writing, were educated, but their messages were just base and vitriolic and ad hominem, a litany of curse words, some of which I had never even heard before. But one of the consistent and surprising themes in the hate mail was how deeply misogynist it was.
I mean, the article, as you know Lily, says almost nothing about women, perhaps to a fault, but the number of hate emails I got that called me things like menstrual discharge, or you must be a pussy woman. You know what? I won't even repeat some of the things that were said, but I thought that was interesting. Why this misogynist streak of criticism for an article that was fundamentally historic and political and not even polemical.
And what I came to think is that when you look back on the movements that we've just cited, whether it was for the rights of women, the aspirations of the people of colour, the aspirations of gay people, I think it's very difficult for anyone. I mean, I'm 66 and I'm almost too young to remember just how crazy it was. To remember a time when a simple hint of homosexuality could ruin a career. It's difficult for people, even my age to remember what real segregation was like in Jim Crow, South, right? When lynchings were as common as autumn leaves.
And so the extraordinary thing and the promise of America is the fact that the movements that we now identify as having been progressive movements around women's rights, gay rights, people of colour, they really represent the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. I mean they represented an absolute transformative view of the world. And the divide really comes down between those who are comfortable with those transitions, and those for whom those movements are either deeply troubling or because of resentment, and I think that one thing we forget is that as those movements grew from the 1950s, certainly through the 1960s into the 70s, these were the very years when factory jobs were going abroad.
If you chart the statistics on the loss of manufacturing employment in America, it almost goes year for year with the rise of those movements.
LC: Is that a coincidence? Do you think they were coupled?
WD: I think it's a complete coincidence.
LC: I’m wondering if they could be coupled and I'm just speculating the other way round, i.e that as America became wealthier as a consequence of globalisation, that wealth enabled the rise of movements. There’s a term you may have come across called post-materialism that argues when communities are more affluent, it actually gives them the space and the time to develop the movements like environmentalism and feminism.
WD: I think that another way that would be fascinating Lily, to reflect upon is where did these three movements come from? I mean, I'm an anthropologist and I take great delight in teaching first year students. And one of the things I always say to them is, if you look back on the values of your great-grandfather or maybe my grandfather, the kind of Edwardian certitudes about the nature of race, the nature of our relationship to landscape, the role of men and women in society, not only would you disagree with many of the certitudes of that era, but you would find many of them morally reprehensible. And yet what we forget about is that before there could be social movements, there had to be some kind of shattering of those certitudes, some kind of intellectual grounding.
These contrarians were mostly women. Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict who famously said the purpose of anthropologist is to make the world safe for human differences. Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Doloria, Gregory Bateson. And these were people who inspired by Boaz were saying, wait a minute, race is an absolute social construct, nothing to do with biology. These were people who were saying, wait a minute, a family can be one man and two women or two women and one man or any combination at all, as long as for a family to be a good family, all you need is love in the household.
They're the ones who anticipated the revelations of genetics by several generations to say that we are all descendants of the same handful of people who walked out of Africa 70,000 years ago. Therefore, every culture shares the same genius and how that genius is expressed is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation. There is no hierarchy in the affairs of culture. The other peoples of the world aren't failed attempts at being you, failed attempts at being modern. Every culture has a unique answer to that fundamental question, what does it mean to be human and alive?
LC: Whilst feminism was raging in the West, the West was still raging in the Amazon. With missionaries pouring into indigenous lands to convert and civilise the communities that had been nearly decimated through centuries of colonialism. The Yawanawa tribe in Acre, Brazil is one such example. Their population had dropped to fewer than 70 people, and the language had been outlawed by the missionaries before their community rebelled against the evangelising and sought to reclaim the language, songs and culture.
The Yawanawa are now in their thousands. But something interesting happened during that process. When I met them in Brazil, they told me that the women who had arrived from the outside, the rubber baron wives, the missionaries, had originally arrived wearing skirts, but at some point they started to arrive wearing trousers. And then a local woman from Rio arrived and drank the sacred medicine ayahuasca, that only the men hitherto that moment had been allowed to drink. In part inspiring two sisters Putanny and Hushahu, to become the community's first ever female shamans. I met with Putanny and her husband, the Chief Nixiwaka (Bira) when they were traveling in England. And they told me a little bit more about that journey.
Putanny: In the year 2005, my sister and I, we received a spiritual call. Women didn't have access to this area as men do. And we were the very first women to step on the sacred space, to go through the spiritual process, to follow the diet from a very sacred plant. No water, no sweets, no sex. It is a full isolation outside of the community. And we need to follow this plant diet for one year. It would be done only by men because it has a very strict and hard process. And then my dad, were the Shamans who've opened this door for us. After we went through this process, we brought strength and enhancement to our culture, to our traditions,
And we brought empowerment to the women, to the children, to the young ones. I'm not a feminist. I don't like this word. I guess that if a woman says she's a feminist she wants to be more than men. She wants to be superior, but I think that men and women have both their own individual value. There is no such thing as men are better or inferior than women and vice versa.
I believe that women should be side by side, balanced in terms of thinking, of working, of the duties and splitting off the duties. The women once wouldn't be even heard. When men would speak, women would have been kept away just listening. Women’s opinion wasn't taken into consideration. Since then women now are heard and are treated with respect. No more than men, but side by side with men.
Chief Nixiwaka: Female participation in our spiritual world has changed a lot. The way they drive our stories. Putanny is a pioneer. The female participation has brought about a new energy, new melodies, new messages from the mother. We are a people who have come from a very oppressive situation from when we were first contacted. We were discriminated against, we were forbidden to speak our language and keep our customs. Our spiritual practices were forbidden. And our people had to face that oppression. And we, just like the other indigenous people in Brazil, lost our traditions, our customs.
We indigenous people have been denied access to a conversation of what it truly means to be human in all its facets; social, economical, political, and environmental. We weren't invited to that conversation. Now we're beginning to be a part of that conversation.
Lily Cole: How do you feel about the way that you're managing to hold on to the traditions and your culture, whilst also being exposed to the technology, the money, the capitalism that comes from the outside world and kind of Western culture for want of a better phrase?
Chief Nixiwaka: In this past few years I've been visited by relatives from North America and South America. And we've been dealing with that situation without losing our customs, without falling into imbalance. And so we can find the harmony between the new, the modern and the traditional. Both coming together. One respecting the other, keeping the balance.
Putanny: Our culture brings the traditional, but also the modernity. The modern is represented by the new musical instruments, the new dances, the way we make our rituals and also represented by the women empowerment.
Chief Nixiwaka: There is a need for reflection and reconnection because we've lost that connection with our creator being. With technology and science, we've advanced so much that we've disconnected. It's time we reconnect with our essence, and that's why I talk about this new age, this new cycle of humanity. This time of peace. This time of reciprocity, of solidarity, of sharing. The way I see it is we're living a moment of human recycling, a transformation. Either we go down this path or we will stop human existence.
Lily Cole: What’s your feeling on the environmental situation. And do you see any changes in your community?
Chief Nixiwaka: There's a big change happening. Our rivers, our water, our forests, they’re all hugely impacted by the climate change. For ourselves, the ones who live in the forest, we can see that very clearly. The only thing that can change it is awareness and consciousness. It is not the animals or the plants fault. It is our fault. If we change it, it will stop. In the same way we had enough knowledge to create the situation, we will have the necessary knowledge to get it back, to recover.
The forest is my home, my school, my hospital, my masters, my doctors, and all the spiritual guard. We learn how to sing with the birds. We learn how to heal a sick person with the animals. The plants are the healers. What can I harm? What can I destroy? Nothing.
Lily Cole: I take great inspiration from the Yawanawa and their willingness to reconcile our disparate cultures. Whilst fighting to reclaim their traditions they have extraordinary forgiveness and acknowledged to me that in spite of the incredibly painful history their community has gone through, there is also a lot they've gained from the cultures that colonised the land. For example, the impact of feminism or the musical instruments that children now play, or the boat that reduces their travel time out of the village by days. Putanny jests that they are only able to come to Europe now because of “the giant metal bird with people, food, and a bathroom inside”.
There is of course a lot that our different cultures can learn from one another. And we have a unique opportunity now to engage in that process of deep listening. I asked Wade Davis a little more about his thoughts on the cultures he's met.
Wade Davis: Culture is not trivial. Culture is not decorative. It's not the clothes we wear. The prayers we utter. It's ultimately, culture is a body of ethical and moral values that every society places around its members to keep at bay, the barbaric heart that history teaches us lies within all human beings. It's culture that allows us to have civilisation, to make sense of sensation, to find order and meaning in the universe.
You know all cultures are myopic, faithful to their own interpretation of reality. And this kind of cultural myopia has been sort of the curse of humanities since the dawn of awareness. We in the West are also famously cultural myopic and we forget that we too are a simple product of our history. And because of the dominance we've enjoyed, ubiquity of our presence on the planet, we tend to think of ourselves as a norm. But we actually are very much the exception in terms of how we think about our place on the planet. And we can understand the nature and the origin of that exceptionalism by going back to Descartes and the enlightenment, you know, in the European tradition, as we tried to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of absolute faith, we throw out all notions of myth, magic, mysticism, but critically metaphor.
And when Descartes said that all that exists is mind and material he kind of in a single gesture, deanimated the world, and the idea that the flight of a bird could have meaning was dismissed as ridiculous. Now, the triumph of the kind of secular materialism has become the concede of modernity, but ubiquity shouldn't imply that it's the norm. Quite to the contrary, most societies around the world have a very different relationship with the natural world based on reciprocity, not on extraction.
You know, we tend to see the world as a sort of a stage set upon which only the human drama unfolds. Plants and animals at best or props on that stage set. Whereas an amazon tribe in the Northwest Amazon, their most profound intuition is that plants and animals are only people in another dimension of reality. Now, before we say, Oh, that's ridiculous, we have to understand the power and the meaning of metaphor. Most societies have a fundamental idea that the earth owes its bounty to humans just as humans in turn owe their fidelity to the earth. Now that essential dynamic of reciprocity becomes very elaborated in incredibly complex ways, both in terms of mythology, myth, ritual, ceremonial activities, et cetera.
I was raised in the forest of British Columbia to believe that the forest existed to be cut. That made me different than my friends amongst first nation raised to believe that those forests are the abode of the crooked beak of heaven. Now, the point isn't whether the forest is cellulose onboard feet or is it domain of spirits. It's how the belief system mediates the relationship between the human population and the natural world with profoundly different consequences for the ecological footprint.
So when I was asked, for example, some years ago to do the CBC's Massey lectures in Canada and an editor put on a snappy title of my book that came out of those lectures, The Wayfinders, and the subtitle was ‘why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world’. I didn't really like the subtitle, but on the other hand, it did force me to answer that question. And I did so with two words, climate change.
We all know we must change the fundamental way in which we inhabit this planet. Every culture has something to say. Each deserves to be heard. There are other options. And what I mean is that the very existence of these other visions of life itself, which are the norm, not the rarity, that's something we're already moving toward.
LC: I loved that book. And I take great inspiration from the fact that there are other systems and ways of seeing the world that we can take inspiration from. Do you worry about the decline of the ethnosphere and are there ways you think we could better equip ourselves to listen and learn from indigenous communities?
WD: Ethnosphere is just a term that I coined in an early book to kind of create an organising principle, parallel to the biosphere, to draw people's attention to the fact that much as we lament the demise of biodiversity on the planet, I don't think even Ed Wilson would suggest that 50% of all plants and animals are more abundant. 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 and the great indicator of that is language loss. And one of the extraordinary statistics is that today, half the languages spoken in the year that I was born are being taught to children.
So we're living through a time when half of humanities intellectual, social, ecological even spiritual knowledge is at risk and this does not have to happen. All peoples everywhere are always dancing with new possibilities for life. These societies are not delicate. They're dynamic and living peoples who are being driven out of existence by identifiable forces. I mean, the remarkable thing is if you look around at the surviving terrestrial biodiversity on the earth, a huge percentage of it is on lands that at least traditionally or titularly belong to indigenous peoples.
LC: So I wanted to ask about what you might have learned from the different ways that these communities perceive reality.
WD: I think the fundamental lesson learn from indigenous people is a different way of thinking about the Earth. The idea that the Kogi and the elder brothers have that the prayers maintain the cosmic balance of the world. That, that sense of, and again, I'm not, you know, I'm not taking these beliefs literally, although they're true beliefs. But what always interests me is the consequences of a belief. And if you really do believe that your rituals maintain the balance of the world, you're going to have a different attitude towards the world than if you believe the world is just there to be exploited. The tragedy of climate change is that indigenous people, who played no role whatsoever in the creation of dilemma, I mean, climate change has become humanity's problem, but it wasn't caused by humanity. It was caused by a narrow subset of humanity with a particular worldview.
And in many ways, in terms of reference of their societies, they're doing more to combat it than we are. And we forget that for us climate change may be a scientific challenge or a scientific debate in some quarters, or an economic opportunity or whatever, but for people who believe that they're responsible for the wellbeing of the world, as many indigenous people do, climate change is a deep existential and psychological crisis. And you see this all around the world, indigenous societies, amping their ritual activities, desperately trying to do something. I've been with Inuit on Headlands in the Arctic. And they look out at the rain and they just say, what is this? This is not our weather.
LC: My friend James Suzman says nomadic communities are the most sustainable communities that have ever walked on the planet because you know, they co-existed with the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years. Is there anything that you felt inspired by when you spend time with nomadic cultures?
WD: Well, certainly in nomadic societies, you know, they're in an acephalous sort of be egalitarian societies. It's a very different way of life. You know, how do you measure wealth given that there's a disincentive to accumulate any material possessions? Well, certainly in the nomadic societies I've been with, wealth has explicitly defined as a strength of social relations between people. Because if those relations fray, everybody suffers. I mean, if you think about it, if you're a hunting and gathering society and you've got a small nuclear family group of say a three men, three women, a bunch of kids, well, if I don't get along with the two other men such that I have to split, that means that night by definition, my children have a two thirds less chance of eating.
So one of the things you see in hunting and gathering societies is a very strong pressure for social solidarity and consilience. So for example, in the Inuit, you would never have swear words. You never in the language, Inuktitut, there’s, you would never speak badly of someone it's inconceivable. You express your displeasure by silence, right? Because nothing must be allowed to threaten the solidarity and thus the survival of the group. And in Penang society and Sarawak, where I spent some time, there’s was no word in their language for thank you because everything is reflexively shared. I once gave a cigarette to an old woman and watched as she tore it apart to distribute the individual strands of tobacco equitably rendering the product useless, but honouring her obligation to share.
LC: Hmm, that's amazing. Do you think that the strength of community and the need for community can in some examples stifle individualism?
WD: By definition it does. I mean this is a big trade-off in history. Do you accept the comfort of conformity that the community gives you? The certainty of faith? You know, I mean, this is the existential dilemma, isn't it? I mean, all of life comes down to two fundamental questions. How and why? And how a society answers those questions determines its, both, its social, political and to great extent its spiritual worldview. And one of the dilemmas of the modern age is, is that when we liberated the individual from the community, again, that was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. And we achieved great personal freedom, a freedom that none of us want to give up. But it also cast us adrift by definition in a world of uncertainty and isolation.
Again, it's not about saying who's right and who's wrong, or what was better. The point of anthropology is never to try to reconstruct the past or freeze people in time. It's really to ask what kind of world we want to live in. And this is our fundamental question. How in this interconnected multicultural world, can we truly generate a pluralistic vision, such that every voice can be heard and each culture can exercise its inherent right to contribute to the table of human wisdom and knowledge.
LC: So can our interconnected world hold together many world views without homogenising them? Is identity politics tearing us up? How do we fight for individual rights without becoming more divided as a society? And what can we learn if we open our minds to other ways of seeing the world?
Here again is Vanessa Nakate, the youth climate activist you met in episode five, speaking to me from Uganda.
Vanessa Nakate: We cannot eat coal and we cannot drink oil. We'll look back and realise that money is nothing, if our life support systems have been destroyed. I believe that the climate crisis is as a result of colonialism, imperialism. I believe that the reason the intersection between racial justice and climate justice, activists from the global south, they have struggled so much to amplify their voices, to get their stories heard because of the kind of system that we found ourselves in.
LC: And when you talk about changing the system, do you have a sense of what that means and you know, what we can learn from other communities or what type of system change we could look to to make?
VN: When I say changing the system, I believe that we are in a system that doesn't treat everyone in a just way. We are in a system that chooses who is more important and who is less important. We are in that kind of system that is filled with discrimination, with racism in different parts of the world. So I believe that the kind of system that we need is one that ensures that people are happy. What makes people happy? Being able to access the necessities, being able to live in an environment that is just, being able to tell their stories, being able to speak up without worrying about anything happening to them, being able to go to school without fear or facing discrimination, being able to get a job without fear or facing discrimination. So we want a kind of system that embraces everyone. I think a system that is diverse enough, that is just, that is equitable and that is sustainable.
In my country and in my culture, they named people after animals. They named people after plants. They named people after trees and they named people after fish. And when I did a research about these, I got to understand that this was something that was brought by our forefathers, our foremothers, those who came before us. So this was something that was put in place in order to preserve wildlife.
Personally, I come from the Elephant clan, so that means I can't do anything to the elephant. I can't eat it. I can't kill it because it's a belief that if I do anything to it, then I'm bringing myself bad luck. So you find that someone is coming from the Elephant clan, someone is coming maybe from the Cow clan. Someone is maybe coming from the Monkey clan. So this was a system that was put in place in order to protect the animals, in order to protect the fish in order to protect everything that connects to nature.
LC: Well, I come from the clan of a Lily for flower.
The ability of indigenous communities to better protect land is made clear in the data. 80% of the world's biodiversity can be found in indigenous territories, even though they only cover a quarter of the world's land. After centuries of cultural oppression, genocide and campaigns to ‘civilise the natives’ through colonialism, the developed world is now looking to indigenous communities to provide pathways to better land management, with none other than the World Bank calling for indigenous communities to be leading participants in conservation, writing ‘The loss of indigenous cultural and spiritual identity and ancestral knowledge is as serious a threat as the massive extinction of species on earth’.
And more and more indigenous men and women are taking positions of leadership around the world. For example, in 2019, the first indigenous woman was elected to Brazil's Congress. New Zealand now has five Maori ministers. And just last week, the highest number of indigenous representatives in history were elected to the US house of representatives.
When people think of indigenous communities, we often think of communities far away in distant lands. But in reality, every land has its own indigenous past. Even… nationalism and patriotism are often viewed as dangerous, perhaps rising forces that can breed xenophobia. But at what point does cultural pride become a problem? Can a sense of cultural identity and pride be extremely positive when it's honoured within a pluralistic worldview? And what is Europe's indigenous past?
To conclude this episode, I thought I would explore the deep time stories of my birthplace. So I spoke to Sam Lee, the folk singer, and song collector, who has spent years trying to trace the song lines on the British Isles.
Same Lee: I mean you and I know very well how wonderful it and what a privilege it is to be able to learn from indigenous tribal peoples from all around the world and the access we have now to a community who are willing to share their knowledge.
But the word indigenous itself is about nascence, it’s about birth and there's a writer who I'm very fond of called Robin Wall Kimmerer and her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, talks specifically about this idea of, for Americans, of newly arrived Americans of what, that quest is to find a sense of indigeneity to their land. But also for us in the UK. What does that mean for a community so separate from our tribal past.
But I think the important thing within all of this is the idea of localism and identity is so much about understanding firstly, your landscape and your natural world, the species of trees, not just the names of the plants and the animals, but understanding who they are as beings and what their role has been in that community of the environment.
It's not that long ago that we had a very thriving oral folk culture. And I'm a folk singer and I've spent years recording and documenting the songs and stories of some of those elders. Some are alive, but many are in living memory and within their memories are this incredible relationship to land and the ancient identities that have emerged out of that relationship with landscape.
In the folk traditions of great Britain and the oral culture that we have, there are hundreds of thousands of different folk songs. In many ways every one of them tells a little bit, is a part of that mosaic of what our ancient newness is and who we are as an ancient people. Some of them go back to the 1800s, some of them go back to the 12th century. There are songs that I've learned that are pre-Christian that have really ancient roots to them. I mean, I'm particularly fond of the songs that sing of the birds or the environment. And there's a wonderful repertoire of songs that speak of the love of the natural world and, you know, Sussex songs, songs from Scotland, some of them speak specifically about a particular bird and there are so many songs that speak of that bird in such a reverential way, that it's not just a nice song. It's a devotional song in the same way that the Yawanawa or the Kaxinawá, or, you know, the Kogi are singing their song in praise of their land. Our songs are exactly the same. They're just a bit more familiar and obvious in our language.
LC: Can you speak a bit to how you find songs, because as I understand it, you encounter different gypsy cultures who have oral traditions. Is that correct?
SL: In the British Isles, there are still ancient people, elders who've grown up as the gypsy travellers who mostly can't read or write. They grew up in caravans. They were born in caravans. They've lived their life around the fire, singing these songs, passing these songs down. There are elders who still remember that way of life and finding them is not easy, but I managed to track down one of these, the tradition bearers.
The work is for me is, is about deep listening. And this is something that as a people, we have lost the art of, spending hours in the company of somebody, sharing their life and their songs and listening to them slowly tell this world. And for me the song collecting, yes, I'm recording and I'm documenting it and I'm putting it online and I'm working with it on a contemporary way. But actually for me, it's about receiving our sovereign birthright inheritance of our local culture and of the stories of the people who came before us. And that for me, is a great privilege to be witness to that and be part of that transmission and also a link in the chain for the sharing it on and keeping that knowledge, these songs, these ideas, and that vibration with it, that comes with them to pass that on in that unbroken way. That's what my role is.
LC: And do you feel like a lot of these communities are thriving or do you feel that we are losing them?
SL: No. I mean, it's the situation with the gypsy travellers is horrific. It's exactly the same issues that are befalling the First Nations and Aboriginals in Australia and all indigenous peoples, is that separation of people from land, the denial of their birthright, practicing of their culture. The illegality of travel for a nomadic people is like telling us that we can't live in houses. We have chastised them from society. We have treated them with such low sense of dignity and respect that they are suffering from all the issues that any community that feels so bottom of the pile will feel. And in Great Britain, the passing through of the criminalisation of trespass that's going through right now will be the final nail in the coffin for that community.
LC: Such a strong memory came back, as you were saying that, of being a child in London, and once I was asking somebody for help, I think I was lost and I was going up to a stranger asking for help, and they just really rudely dismissed me. And it emerged that they thought I was a gypsy begging.
SL: Yeah. Well, I mean the amazing thing, knowing you a little bit, Lily, is you grew up in Ladbroke Grove in West London and there's a massive Irish traveler community that are still there living in caravans underneath the A40 flyover, which goes right through central London is right at the heart of that bit of London that you grew up in. So people in the area are well aware of that community and would put boundaries up between them. You know, that's why they’re fenced in under this motorway flyover. So I'm not surprised that people would, you know, with your Irish face, your red hair, might've seemed like one of them and not been helped out.
LC: I don't want to put you on the spot and feel free to say no, but are there any of those older songs, are there any that you know off by heart that you could share?
SL: Many! I mean, what can I sing for you now? In terms of the really ancient ones, there's one that some say goes back to the Cane and Able story of the two brothers. And it's a very ancient ballad called ‘The two brothers’ or ‘What put the blood’. And it's about the conversation between a son and his mother with her asking where this blood is on him, on his shirt. And he admits that he's killed his own brother and they fought over this cutting of a tree.
And there's lots of interpretation. I'm really believing that this, the allegory of this song is about a boy who is accepting the consequences of his actions and his conversation with the mother is actually about mother earth. And I think the song is not as literal as a boy and his mum, but actually about the conversation that we are having about what destroying our planet means and what we're going to do.
It's a song that has existed across the British Isles and Ireland, but it's unknown where it's from, whether it's Scandinavian in origin, whether it's pre Celtic, going back to Pictish tribes, to the ancient tribes of this land. So we'll never really know, but there are versions of it that exist in other parts of Europe, which suggests that it migrated.
I first heard that from my teacher who was the last of the Scottish travellers. Sadly it's a culture and a language that's almost extinct now, Stanley Robertson. And hearing him sing it, having heard recordings of it, and you know, it being sung so many times on records throughout the folk revival in the sixties and seventies and eighties, and many people have sung it, but to hear it some from one of those people - the tradition bearers, the sourcing as we call them, like dipping my cup into the deepest purest well, and drinking that water, was like hearing no other song I'd ever heard. And that really did, it made it a powerful mark, but he was singing it for a very different reason than I'd ever heard the song being sung. And it was out of a sort of sense of purpose that this was what he and his culture do. This is why they're there, is to sing these songs, is to tell that story.
Here goes…
Where have you been all the long summer’s day?
Son, come tell it unto me.
I’ve been hunting and fowling the whole day long.
And it's mama pardon me, oh, and it’s mama pardon me.
Son, come tell it unto me.
Oh that is the blood of my brother John,
for he would not rule by me, by me
And he would not rule by me.
And what did you kill your own brother for?
Son, come tell it unto me.
I killed him because he cut the little tree
And the the bird that flew from tree to tree to tree,
that flew from tree to tree.
Lily Cole: This episode has teased at some fundamental questions. Are we able to honour and respect our differences whilst remembering our essential similarities? Could cultural pride be aligned with an international outlook? Can we change the fundamental understanding of our relationship to the natural world. Would answering these questions, help bring together our increasingly polarised politics?
You can learn more about indigenous communities in my book, Who Cares Wins, which is out now in hardback, e-book and audio book. And finally here to end is a sound recording I made of the Yawanawa women singing, including Hushahu Yawanawa, recorded deep within the Amazon.