Pop anthropologist Wade Davis, the first of whose CBC Radio Massey lectures¹ just ended in the Atlantic time zone, obviously has a lot of knowledge to impart about the Earth’s diverse human cultures. So why did her waste a good half of the opening talk shooting racist fish in a 19th Century barrel? Davis’s point was that the errant 19th Century “science” of physical anthropology dripped with colonial arrogance, but the thinly disguised subtext seemed to be Davis’s own moral superiority to these imperial prigs.
The effect was both distasteful and boring, like listening a 21st Century astrophysicist satirize the Ptolemaic conceit of Earth as center of the universe. Yes, Wade, we know the Earth is not flat, and brown-skinned people are not inferior. Congratulations. Can we move on please? Ironically, toward the end of his lecture, Davis himself slipped into a bit of 19th Century noble savage romanticism.
The thesis of Davis’s Massey lectures—that Earth’s myriad cultures are “humanity’s greatest legacy… the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species”—holds promise. Now that Davis has flashed his credentials as an enlightened egalitarian, let’s hope the remaining four talks deliver on it.
¹ I cannot link to the audio file, because the Ideas’ producers have not seen fit to post it. Why is it that Ideas, the CBC show that could benefit most from the time-shifting and archiving potential of streaming audio, has been among the slowest to adopt it?