The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

This study guide refers to the 2009 House of Anansi Press edition of Wade Davis’s The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. The Wayfinders collects a series of five Massey Lectures that Davis delivered in Canada in 2009. Davis is a Colombian-Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist, and the Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. This position, as well as his long anthropological career, has allowed Davis to spend time with many of the earth’s oldest and most remote cultures, including the San of Southern Africa; indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest, Borneo, Australia, and Canada; Tibetan Buddhists, Saharan nomads, and several others.

These lectures celebrate and explain the traditional wisdom and worldviews of these cultures. Davis argues that despite the primitivist lens we read these peoples through, their worldviews have allowed them to adapt to and maintain health in environments that many of us today could not fathom surviving in without drastic industrial modification. In these lectures Davis couples review of contemporary and historical anthropology and ecology and other scientific fields with insightful personal accounts of meetings with individual members of these cultures and traditions. Through this technique, he crafts an intellectual and empathic argument for the preservation of these cultures and the shifting of Western ideals toward more ancient conceptions of the value of habitat and community.