Wade Davis
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
The Lacerte Family Lecture
"Vanishing Cultures: from Haitian Voodoo to Amazonian Myth"
Wade Davis is an anthropologist, botanical explorer, and best-selling author who received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Harvard University. He spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections.
Davis's work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best-seller that appeared in ten languages and was later adapted by Universal Studios as a motion picture. He is author of five other books, including One River (1996), Shadows in the Sun (1998) and Light at the Edge of the World (2001).
Born December 14, 1953, in British Columbia, Davis is a citizen of Canada, Ireland, and the United States. He has worked as a guide, park ranger, and forestry engineer. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork among several indigenous societies of northern Canada.
Davis has published scientific and popular articles on subjects ranging from Haitian voodoo and Amazonian myth and religion to the global biodiversity crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the ethnobotany of South American Indians. His photographs have been published widely. Recently Davis's work has taken him to Peru, Borneo, Tibet, the high Arctic, the Orinoco Delta of Venezuela, and northern Kenya.
A research associate of the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, Davis is also a board member of the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecotrust, Future Generations, and Cultural Survival—all nongovernmental organizations dedicated to conservation-based development and the protection of cultural and biological diversity.
Davis's television credits include Earthguide, a 13-part television series on the environment, which he hosted and co-wrote. He also wrote for the documentaries Spirit of the Mask, Cry of the Forgotten People, and Forests Forever.