Wade Davis presents
Vanishing Cultures, Enduring Lives
7:30 pm Tuesday, Feb. 22.
First Congregational Church, 1126 SW Park Ave., 222-2537.
$15.
Wade Davis is the
kind of guy who interrupts interviews to help his kids with
geometry; you'd never guess that he's the closest thing anthropology
has to a rock
star. His best-selling 1985 book The Serpent and the
Rainbow revealed that Haitian voodoo
societies really do turn people into zombies--the
so-called "living dead"--using a powerful secret poison to
induce coma. Traveling everywhere from Borneo to Tibet, Davis
has reportedly sampled every hallucinogen known to Western
science. If you've considered munching the "vision vine,"
read on.
Willamette Week: How does it feel to be the zombie
guy still?
Wade Davis: If nothing else, it allowed me to become a
writer. I wrote Serpent in seven weeks, it was edited
in a day and a half, and it's sold over 400,000 copies.
And I had the opportunity to examine a phenomenon that had
been stereotyped in an explicitly racist way and discover
that it had a basis. Before that, zombies were dismissed
as phantasmagoria. The thing that has been ignored by critics
is that cultural context is absolutely key to the creation
of zombies. Japanese people dosed with the same toxin used
on zombies don't become zombies, they become poison victims.
[Davis discovered that voodoo priests use the same toxin
found in some Japanese seafood delicacies to turn people
into zombies.]
Serpent led some people to start calling
you "the real-life Indiana Jones." How do you feel about
that?
Geraldo Rivera originally gave me that moniker on 20/20.
Then, I went on the Today show and they introduced
me like that. So I said to Bryant Gumbel, "Look, your viewers
should know that I'm just like everyone out there. I have
no money, my girlfriend's on my case about it, and I have
no idea what I'm going to do next. But, hey, if you want
to know about zombies, I'll tell you all about it." The
segment never aired.
Now you focus on cultural diversity. How do you
convince people who can get everything they need at supermarkets
and malls that primitive, backward-looking cultures are
worth saving?
Ask anyone what they think is a more interesting place
to be: a Wal-Mart with a McDonald's next door, or a crossroads
store somewhere in rural Oregon where you can sit down and
talk to the owner. Everyone--even those of us who might
like the price structure at Wal-Mart--will tell you that
the little, unique store is a more interesting place to
be. People are not stupid.
In all your travels, what's scared you the most?
I was lost for 10 days without food in the Darién
Gap, the roadless jungle between Colombia and Panama. Now,
if you told me, go sit in the Darién Gap for 10 days,
no problem. But when you're lost, you don't know how long
you're going to be lost or if you're ever going to be found.
That, and taking Ayawasca, the vision vine. Ayawasca is
the hallucinogen jaguar shamans in Colombia take during
transformative ceremonies. It's many things, but fun isn't
one of them.
What's the most moving thing you've seen?
More than any single thing, I've gained an appreciation
for serendipity. I went to Harvard because I was working
in a lumber camp in Canada and some draft-dodger kid had
a copy of Life magazine that had pictures of the
1969 Harvard strike in it. And he was so irreverent and
marvelous, while we Canadians were so quiet and obsequious.
So I thought, that must be where you go to become like him.
I applied and got in. A few years later, I'm in Haiti looking
for zombies.
I've been lucky. I can name 10 or so of my best friends
who've had terrible things happen to them--they've died
of strange diseases, been eaten by crocodiles in the Zambezi
River...so I'm fortunate that I'm OK.
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Willamette Week | originally
published February 16,
2000
|
