Posts tagged "wisdom"
9
November 11
‘No new forms of human development and progress can omit tribal wisdom; their memories are worth more than the sum of computers’ memories. They have achieved what the modern consuming society has not managed to achieve over the last centuries: a fulfilling, rich life that does not threaten the planet’s chances of survival.’
- Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement
1
November 11
‘I am the environment.
I was born in the forest,
and I grew up there. I know it well.
Without land and nature, we can’t live, the world can’t work.
You talk of the planet, yet you don’t
think it has a heart and breathes,
but it does.
You talk politics and study on paper.
But we study in the forest and look
carefully. You don’t know our wisdom.
It’s very different.
We understand that all living things have a noreshi - another living being which is born at the exact same time
as yourself.
Your noreshi may be a bird, or a boar, or a deer, or a fish, or an anteater, a
butterfly or any other kind of living plant or animal.
It rests when you rest, it feeds
when you feed, it sings when you sing.
It dies when you die.’
- Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami, Brazil
21
September 11
‘The Yanomami shaman doesn’t distinguish between the fate of his people and the fate of the rest of humanity. Whilst desperately seeking to preserve his beliefs and his rituals, the Yanomami shaman believes he is working towards the salvation of even his cruellest enemies. Expressed in metaphysical terms with which we are no longer familiar, this concept of humanity’s solidarity and diversity, is strikingly important. There is a message here. For it is the responsibility of the last spokesman of a society that has been endagered, together with so many others, through our own actions, to express such wisdom. There are, however, still too few of us who understand that our own survival depends on such philosophy’ - French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss

‘The Yanomami shaman doesn’t distinguish between the fate of his people and the fate of the rest of humanity. Whilst desperately seeking to preserve his beliefs and his rituals, the Yanomami shaman believes he is working towards the salvation of even his cruellest enemies. Expressed in metaphysical terms with which we are no longer familiar, this concept of humanity’s solidarity and diversity, is strikingly important. There is a message here. For it is the responsibility of the last spokesman of a society that has been endagered, together with so many others, through our own actions, to express such wisdom. There are, however, still too few of us who understand that our own survival depends on such philosophy’

- French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss