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Wade
Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic
Society. He holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received
his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University.
Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent
over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among
fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making
some 6000 botanical collections.
His 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 ten languages and
was later released by Universal as a motion picture.
His other books include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest
(1990), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), The Clouded
Leopard (1998), Shadows in the Sun (1998), Rainforest
(1998), Light at the Edge of the World (2002), The
Lost Amazon (2004) and One River (1996), which
was nominated for the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for
Nonfiction.
He currently
is working on, Fire on the Mountain, a history of the
early British efforts on Everest. He is the recipient of numerous awards
including the 2002 Lowell Thomas Medal (The Explorer’s
Club) and the 2002 Lannan Foundation $125,000 prize for
literary non-fiction. In 2004 he was made an Honorary
Member of the Explorer’s Club, one of
twenty so named in the hundred-year history of the club. In recent years
his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia,
Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland.
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Light
at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing
Cultures
by Wade Davis
"...
I never understood how I was supposed to turn up at some village...
announce that I was staying for a year, and then notify the headman
that he and his people were to feed and house me while I studied
their lives," writes Davis in the introduction to this stunning
collection of photographs that span the 25 years of his career.
His solution was to find cultural common ground through the study
of food and plants, which often was the ostensible reason for his
travels through Canada, the Andes, the Amazon, Haiti, Kenya and
Tibet. While Davis emphasizes that "at no time was photography
[my] principal pursuit," his photographs are visually dazzling.
A smiling Barasana boy of the Northwest Amazon holds a brilliantly
colored macaw. Indeed, these dramatic photographs frequently overshadow
Davis's informative, witty essays, which introduce each of the seven
chapters. In these, he shares anecdotes about the people he's met,
reflects on the effects of colonialism in these areas and laments
the uncertain fate of groups like the Penan of Borneo and the nomads
of Kenya. |
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A native of British Columbia,
Davis, a licensed river guide, has worked as park ranger, forestry engineer,
and conducted ethnographic fieldwork among several indigenous societies
of northern Canada. He has published 140 scientific and popular articles
on subjects ranging from Haitian vodoun and Amazonian myth and religion
to the global biodiversity crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs,
and the ethnobotany of South American Indians. He has written for National
Geographic, Newsweek, Premiere, Outside, Omni, Harpers, Fortune, Men's Journal,
Condé Nast Traveler, Natural History, Utne Reader, National Geographic
Traveler, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The
Globe and Mail, and several other international
publications. His photographs have been widely published. His research has
been the subject of more than 600 media reports and interviews in Europe,
North and South America and the Far East, and has inspired numerous documentary
films as well as three episodes of the television series, The X-Files.
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