Human life cannot be measured by how long one lives or the quality of life one led. Humanities’ legacy is assessed by one’s moral, cultural, and spiritual beliefs. Through the study of cultures, society can investigate the myriad ways of being brought into essence by the human mind. By examining endangered cultures, society is able to observe individual belief, progress, corruption, political dominance, and even the effects of globalization. In the end society is trying to gauge the morals of working towards the greater good and that is done through answering the age old question, what is one life worth?
Currently Earth holds over 7,012,580,077 human beings, and astonishingly no identical matches of physical or genetic humans have been recorded. So at this moment, Earth contains 7,012,580,077 variations of one species. Humans being the rather introverted creatures that they are feel the need to identify with a group. The need to blend in is not a modern concept for our species. In fact, it is an extremely old survival skill. The animals who are not the most physically gifted, the best hunters, or particularly talented in camouflaging tend to parish alone and thus they find solace and survival residing in group.
As the hominids began to evolve, expand their comprehension and awareness with nature many humans were able to reside in caves and makeshift houses. On the South African coast the Klasies River cave is home to many artifacts from the Middle Stone Age. Perhaps the most peculiar artifacts found in the cave were tools made of nonlocal materials. These findings suggest that the hominids who occupied the cave traded with other tribes, the concept of trade is a very progressive philosophy for the Middle Stone Age. Through the evidence of trade, scientists are able to conclude that societal living is not necessarily a learned habit. Through these communal societies humans began to develop customs, beliefs, and specialized skills from their unique clan and habitat. As the humans expand their tribe through offspring, we begin to see genetic divergence. Many anthropologists believe the main trigger of the divergence could be traced to Lake Toba, located in Medan Indonesia. In the Middle Stone Age, the largest volcanic eruption of the last two million years occurred. The aftermath caused a worldwide temperature drop which caused a volcanic winter. The frigid climate and drought wiped out many of the earth’s hominids. If the anthropologists from National Geographic are right, then the eruption in Lake Toba marks the point when the small group who founded the human line of decent began to diverge rapidly and began the broad path of genetic diversity found in modern humans. With this divergence, different groups of people went their own ways and began to create distinctive ways of being. The tribes were secluded for many years and developed their own communication systems, belief system, and rituals. These attributes gave birth to the tribe’s culture. Culture serves as an identification system for the tribe. In short, culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. Edward B. Tylor rationalizes the concept of culture through explaining, “Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds (Davis, 2007).” An ethnicity is the most powerful group a person can belong to. Celebrating the ethnicity through everyday habits exhibited by the members of the society is the best way to keep a culture alive. Tylor’s insight is rather accurate, apart from a culture does not only exist in the human mind; it is materialized through rituals, garments, diet, resources, location, economy, and language. Language is a huge indicator of the well being of an ethnicity. Through these practices, the wisdom transitions out from the confines of the brain. Wisdoms that modern people have since forgotten about like hunting, gathering, animal tracking, and plant medicine are dexterities which the city folk who do not live off the land have dispelled. The Huaorani tribe who dwell in the northeastern forest of Ecuador still utilize many skills that are deemed dated by modern society. Hunters of the Huaorani could smell animal urine from forty paces away and accurately label the species that left the feces. This skill holds no value to a business man in New York or a musician in London but it can determine if a family of the Huaorani will eat that week. Skills that a people use and need are specific to their way of life and their culture. The innumerable cultures of the world make a web of spiritual life, cultural life that envelops the planet and is as important to the well being of the planet as the biosphere. Wade Davis, a famous anthropologist, coined the term ethnosphere which he explains as the sum total of all thoughts, dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, and intuitions brought into being by the human imagination. Since the dawn of consciousness, the ethnosphere is humanities great legacy. It is the symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species.
Today’s world is considered by many to be a globalized world. Every corner of the world can connect to the opposite side of the globe in an instant; this global communication has its benefits. The ability to trade with remote countries opens opportunities for the sharing of knowledge, goods, and culture, in which both countries benefit. Yet the countries which the industrialized world chooses to recognize consist of other industrialized countries able to trade.
When interacting with another country or culture it is presumed that either there is almost no cultural boundaries or that no universal likeness exists between the acquainted. Their actions are atypical, their mannerisms foreign, and to tell the truth, many feel that diversity exists down to their genetic codes. Population genetics has proven that race is fiction. The genetic endowment of humanity is one single continuum. Everyone is brothers and sisters; all of humanity is the result of a Diaspora over forty thousand years, twenty five thousand generations of the 150 people who walked out of Africa. All human cultures share the same raw human genius. If this is true, how are so many variations possible?
The world in which we live in is but just one path of life. The path our ancestors traveled down lead us to now. Their decisions formed our future, what we know as life results directly from their choices to our present. When the first humans walked out of Africa over 60,000 years ago the species did not stay as a whole (National Geographic, 2012). The human species split up into smaller tribes to survive and ended up in completely different regions of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The humans developed different survival skills in order to adapt to their drastic climates. The humans who dwelled in the north developed keen hunting skills that allowed them to survive the winters and eventually move as far north as Siberia. They learned to live off of Mammoth and other large game to provide the nutrients their bodies required for survival. Descendents of the Siberian tribe eventually were able to cross Beringia, the land mass that connected Asia and North America until 10,000 B.C(National Geographic, 2012). Other humans stayed south and learned the art of gathering and eventually agriculture. Hunting and gathering lead some tribes to follow migration patterns through Europe, Asia, Africa, and even into Australia. The drastic outcomes of the decedents of the pack, who wandered out of Africa, can be traced back to environmental choices. What seemed like a simple decision of where to settle down was, in reality, rather complicated for a species that lacked an advanced physical skill set. Of course, branching off has occurred since the original one hundred and fifty hominids’ offspring have reproduced but the original split was caused directly by the offspring of the one hundred and fifty hominids whom wandered out of Africa. The results of this split propelled human kind into a myriad combination of different ways of being, other ways of thinking and other ways of orienting oneself in the earth. Even though the variations of humans are numerous in the same light we are all the same. Population genetics has proven race to be fictional because the genetic endowment of humanity is one single continuum where everyone is related. This concept is still visible today in the offspring of Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan possessed a mutation of the Y chromosome which when passed on to male offspring remains unchanged, this way geneticists are able to track the Y chromosome through generations of males. As of 2003, 1 in 200 men carried the specific Y chromosome that Genghis Khan produced (Travis, 2003). This proves that race is interconnected. If this mutation has spread in roughly 1,000 years to 1 out of every 200 males world-wide imagine how universal a trait would be if it existed since the Diaspora. If population genetics is correct it is possible to assume that all races are equal since there is next to no genetic difference. How do humans rationalized the concept that one ethnicity greater than another?
Humanities’ morals, beliefs, traditions, and family created a way of being that is unique to each peoples. Wade Davis explained consequences of the paths by saying, “It is utterly astonishing learning from those who have not forgotten the old ways, those who feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by the rain and taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that Jaguar shaman still journeys beyond The Milky Way or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning or that in the Himalayas the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the dharma. By learning through them is to remember the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live in does not exist in some absolute sense but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage successfully made many generations ago.” No matter whom we are, what country or ethnicity we identify with, what our morals and belief system preaches, as humans we are all answering the same question: What does it mean to be human and be alive? We all share in the same adaptive imperatives. We are all born, we all bring our children into the world, we go through initiation rites, we have to deal with death, so it shouldn’t surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, and we all produce art. But what is interesting is the cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture. Millions of different answers are returned because though every human answer to the same question, their response is not vocal but it is expressed with their actions, their beliefs, and ultimately their legacy.
The color green, deemed the universal sign towards the movement to save the biosphere. Saving the planet is a wonderful concept that has brought light to the very important and pressing matter of the biosphere’s rapid deterioration. This recycling trend has reached high popularity to the point where it is considered a fad. However, no scientist could ever make the conclusion that over 50% of all species is on the brink of extinction because it is simply not true yet this conclusion is the sad reality of the ethnosphere. Just as the biosphere is being quickly eroded so is the ethnosphere. The major indicator towards ethnospheric decay is the loss of language. Wade Davis expresses the importance of language by saying, “Language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules, it is a flash of the human spirit, and it is the vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world (Davis, 2007).” By using language as an indicator one is able to harness the thoughts and grasp the culture of a people. Through language people are able to express all emotions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and stories which passes the wisdom of the elders down to the future generations. Before written language, humans learned through storytelling. The youth learned everything from necessary survival skills to complex beliefs about the universe through the art of the story. Yet, because of modernization and increasing globalization the obscure languages are becoming obsolete. No more than sixty years ago over six thousand different languages were spoken, now no more than three thousand are whispered into the ears of the youth. This means that within one generation over half of the world’s languages have been wiped away. The loss of one language doesn’t seem very impactful; the true tragedy of the situation starts to become clear when their past is wiped away without a trace. Every two weeks a tribal elder dies and carries to the grave the last syllables of a language.
We as a race are not just losing a mode of communication we are losing a piece of our history. An irreplaceable piece of our existence filled with unique ways of life and its own blueprint for life. Within one generation the world will lose half of humanities’ intellectual, social, and spiritual legacy. Yet the fates of these endangered cultures do not concern the public. Many anthropologists believe that years from now the 20th century will not be remembered for its wars or technological innovations but rather as an era where we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of the biological and cultural diversity on the planet. Genocide, considered to be the physical extinction of a people, is universally condemned but ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s way of life is not only not condemned, it is universally celebrated as a part of a developmental strategy. These destructive methods hide under the façade of globalization, trade, cultural unity, and political domination.
The problem isn’t that the indigenous people cannot change or adapt because that simply isn’t true. All cultures through all time have engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life. Wade Davis explains, “The problem isn’t the technologies itself; the Sioux did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow (Davis, 2007).” It is not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere; it is power, the crude face of domination. Where ever you look around the world, you realize these are not cultures destined to fade away. These are dynamic living people being driven out of existence by identifiable forces out of their capacity to adapt to. A rather sad example of this is the Penan. The hunter-gatherer tribe of the Penan live in the rainforests in Borneo, the same rainforests where large scale commercial logging caused mass devastation to environment, caused many to lose their homes (Harrison, 2001). Since the Penan are hunter-gathers, they need the land. Unfortunately, the Sarawak government doesn’t recognize the Penan’s rights to their land and thus in an attempt to make money, the Sarawak government invited a large-scale commercial logger to make profit of the abundant lumber. They are not like the people in towns who have money and can buy things. If the Penan lose the forest they will die. The death of the Penan doesn’t only come in a spiritual sense, when the Penan loses their habitat they are forced to make the transition to modern society. For a people who have been cut off for so long, being dumped into an unforgiving city with no knowledge, education, or compensation leads to a life in the slums, lower class, and mostly compromising jobs. Is the profit made off of the forests worth more than the quality of life for these people? The welfare of a few usually is sacrificed for the greater good of the society. It seems like a government who deems this destruction acceptable lacks a conscience. How could government officials sleep at night knowing that they just put innocent people on the street with little hope? Yet, the money gained from such a transaction is so great that the counter attack towards the government’s lack of consciousness is that with the money gained the government is able to provide education, food stamps, healthcare, and shelter to all of its citizens. There are far more citizens that the government could help by gaining money through its resources than the few indigenous people they would be preserving.
Now the debate at hand is what is one life worth? To truly understand this question, every human needs to look at their own beliefs and determine if man was born with natural rights. Though it is widely accepted that man is born with rights, the degree of natural rights is still debated among countries today. In many instances, humanity sees the corruption of natural rights for the good of the society. A prime example of government baseness can be found when looking at the United States government taking advantage of Native American alcoholism. A gene mutation found in Native Americans causes the effects of alcohol to subside. This trait is found in certain ethnic groups and can cause alcoholism. Alcoholism being an addictive disease caused many of the Native Americans to become reckless in their drinking and more likely to make poor decisions in the name of booze. The United States government saw their weakness as an opportunity to seize the land which they so desperately wanted (Marcella, 2005). The Declaration of Independence states that all men are born with the natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This philosophy, derived from John Locke’s theory of life, liberty, and property is the basis of modern natural rights. At what point is government overstepping their power by seizing property? By appropriating land the natives were forced to conform to society, which for some was an insurmountable change. Yet in many countries reservations were available as compensation. Reservations sounded like the perfect solution; it provides a location where the old ways may be preserved amidst the constantly changing “modern” society. However, even on the reservations Native American culture was under attack. The children, forced to attend American schools, learned that their culture was incorrect and thus their culture was stripped from them by a process known as Americanization. Throughout the world this concept is utilized in hopes of creating one cultural identity throughout a nation.
Yet, it is not only geographical destruction that decimated tribes. When a tribe is secluded for generations, the people are not exposed to foreign substances therefore; they do not build up tolerance that can be passed down through genetics, the immune mutations protecting future generations. It is widely known that during the age of exploration many of the tribes discovered in the new world died off because of contracting diseases from the explorers whom were immune. Common viruses spread through the new world decimating natives. Since the age of exploration, many of the tribes whom were originally contacted has since built up immune systems to protect them from disease, however the tribes who have since stayed secluded are still susceptible. The Zo’é, a tribe whom reside in the northern Amazon rainforest of Brazil, are a prime example of a tribe whom lacks sufficient immune system. Originally contacted by missionaries in 1987, the Zo’é once a thriving tribe fell drastically in numbers thanks to the flu and meseals. Since then the Brazilian government took precautions to preserve the remains of the tribe by placing the Zo’é in a bubble. For the benefit of the Zo’é, no tribe member is allowed off of the reservation and no foreigner is allowed access to the reservation (Harrison, 2001). However, the Zo’é felt that restricting their tribe to one area of land violated their rights as free citizens. The first of the Zo’é have recently ventured to Brasilia to ask for education, training in modern health and science, and jobs so that the tribe can bring in money and one day be able to pop the bubble and be in touch with the world. In both examples of the Zo’é and the Native Americans, the government played a major role in the tribe’s well being. Politics control the world; the politicians decide the best course of action for a country’s wellbeing. It is their duty to look after the minorities while acting for the good of the general population. Mao ZeDong’s Tibetan Cultural Revolution, which forced Tibetans to conform to new ideals, was a brutal political conquest masked under the façade of unity. Tibetans fled to safe havens to preserve their virtues and ideals. To Mao, sacrificing a few lives for unity was worth killing off his own people and destroying a peaceful culture.
Endangered cultures can find solace in the instances of hope. Canada provides a great example of living along side their native people. Not only has the Canadian government provided the Inuit with ample land. The Inuit are a free governing tribe who live by their rules. The Canadian government, realizing that they need some financial support to openly trade with others, has provided funding, education and healthcare to the people who want the help. Another great example of positive steps towards preserving the loss of knowledge and customs of the endangered cultures is a project called Enduring Voices. This project sponsored by national geographic is trying to preserve as many languages as they can, but since a language dies out every fourteen days they are fighting a losing battle. The objective of the mission is to learn the languages from the elders and record not just the language it’s self but also the culture’s beliefs and stories. Once they obtain the information they teach the tribe’s descendants the language. By reinstating a language the linguists hope that the culture will once again thrive.
In the end humans must ask themselves, Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? Since the world is home to so many different walks of life humanity will never answer this in unison. Anthropologist Margret Mede shares her view on the topic, “ My greatest fear was as we drifted toward this blandly amorphous generic world view, not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow reality of thought but we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities. It is humbling to remember that our species has perhaps been around for over six million years. In the time span of ten thousand years, the Neolithic revolution which gave us agriculture at the time we succumbed to the cult of the seed, the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the pros of the priesthood; we created hierarchy, specialization, and even surplus. The modern industrial world as we know it is only three hundred years old and that short history does not suggest that we have all the answers to the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia (Davis, 2003).” The moral of the story is the fact that there is no way to ensure that humanity is on the right path. So instead of pursuing one path we should in fact be pursing all paths of life incase society does have it wrong. Instead of throwing away knowledge we should be striving to preserve it. No life is unimportant and every single person has wisdom that can help humanity as a whole. If society does not recognize and value life, perhaps that just proves how negligent humanity can be.
At what point is the idea of unity doing more harm than good? By saying that humanity should strive for universal peace, equality, and a utopian society is saying that in essence all of humanity needs to become one in order to live without stereotypes, prejudice ideals and corruption. Yet, by removing individual beliefs humans are erasing history. No way of being is the correct way of being and without differing ideals, humanity will not progress. Once a utopian society is reached, progress will cease to exist because there is no need for it. One concern in hoping for a utopia is that if humanity slips into a stage of regression, at some point, generations into the utopia, will education be thrown at the wayside due to a lack of necessity? Meanwhile, the earth’s resources will be utilized until the resources cease to exist. At this time, progress will be more necessary than ever to sustain human life. If humans regress into a primitive state of mind, cognitively they will not be capable of sustaining and advancing life. If that is so, then humans may cease to exist altogether. Even if humanity does accept every philosophical walk of life, the problem of race and genetic diversity still exists. Population genetics has proven that race is fiction and that the genetic endowment of humanity is one single continuum since all of humanity is the result of a Diaspora of 40,000 years over 25,000 generations (Davis, 2003). Even though many parts of the world have embraced racial equality, hatred still exists. Sadly, blatant racism is still very much prevalent. In 1976, a group of white miners in Columbia were charged with the murder of several Cuiva Indians. They had no legitimate reason for the attack. Their defense was that they didn’t believe the murders were wrong because they didn’t consider the Cuiva to be human (Davis, 2003). Humans still have racist notions deeply rooted into the subconscious they are. These prejudice feelings don’t have to be a directly infused trait. Many children learn racism from the actions of their parents and other members of society. Fighting off preconceived notions is a difficult task which would require the child to be secluded until learning about all cultures.Individual beliefs will always exist and that’s the way it should be because there is so much that humans have yet to learn from others. Besides the fact that a utopian society is merely a goal to strive for, not a reality to work towards, erasing humanities’ memory of intolerance and violence is a task that is nearly impossible. So instead of working towards an unbiased humanity where cultural diversity is present, humanity should be working towards progressing in the field of cultural tolerance. The way this can be accomplished is through education. Teaching humans the ways of others demonstrates the similarities of mankind which humanity as a whole tends to overlook. As humans we all share the same cognitive abilities so it is no surprise that we all dance, sing, and express ourselves. It is the rhythm of the dance and the tune of the song that set cultures apart. Until people learn that there is absolutely no right way of living there will always be corruption. But through universal education, humans can teach the ways of others in the hope that one day prejudice, corruption, and inequality will disappear. In the end, the one thing that all of human kind can cling onto is the idea of hope. The hope that one day humans can harness all of the wisdom of the lives lived before them while progressing towards universal tolerance where every life is worth just as much as the next life.