“We all share 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 the inexorable separation of death, so it shouldn’t surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art.
But what’s interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rythm of he dance in every culture.
All of these people teach that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth.
And this is an idea, if you think about it can only fill you with hope. Now toghether the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelops the planet and is as important to the well-being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. And you might think of this cultural way of life as being an etnosphere and you might define the etnosphere as beign the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciusness.
The etnosphere is humanity’s great legacy.
It’s the symbol of all that we are and that can be as astonishingly inquisitive species.”
W. Davis, National Geographic.