Free The Wayfinders by Wade Davis

Americas gave Europe tobacco, the potato and
the tomato, maize, peanuts, chocolate, peppers, squash, pineapples, and the
sweet potato. From the New World came quinine to treat malaria, the muscle
relaxant d-Tubocurarine derived from Amazonian arrow poisons, and cocaine
from the plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality. These
three drugs profoundly impacted Western medicine; cinchona bark, the source
of quinine, alone saved tens of thousands of lives. Europe offered to the
Americas wheat, barley, oats, goats, cows, African slavery, and steel, as
well as typhus, malaria, measles, influenza, smallpox, and the plague.
Ninety percent of the Amerindian population died within a generation or two
of contact.
    The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled the
early Spaniards, as did Cusco, the Inca city of gold. No place in Spain, by
all contemporary accounts, could compare to either capital. The empire of
the Inca only existed because it guaranteed freedom from want and
starvation. Storehouse complexes distributed along the spine of the Andes
held in reserve hundreds of thousands of bushels of quinoa, maize,
lisas
,
oca
,
añu
, and vast amounts of
chuño
, the world’s first freeze-dried food, fabricated from any
number of the 3,000 varieties of potatoes domesticated by the pre-Columbian
civilizations of South America.
    In contrast, four centuries after the Conquest,
London was the centre of the European world, the wealthiest and most
powerful city on earth. But the death rate on one side of town was twice
that of the other. One in five children died in birth. The children of the
poor, on average, were 6 inches shorter and 11 pounds lighter than the
offspring of the rich, according to the records of the British Army. Jack
London, describing the urban life of the great capital in 1901, at the
height of its prestige and technological superiority, writes of the poor
scrambling over heaps of hospital garbage, scraps piled high, “on a huge
platter in an indescribable mess — pieces of bread, chunks of grease and fat
pork, the burnt skin from the outside of roasted joints, bones, in short,
all the leavings from the fingers and mouths of sick ones suffering all
manner of diseases. Into this mess the men plunged their hands, digging,
pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting and scrambling for food. It
wasn’t pretty. Pigs couldn’t have done worse. But the poor devils were
hungry.”
    There was one scholar in the early history of
anthropology who recognized the inadequacies of broad theories of culture
concocted by men who never went to the field and whose ideas about human
advancement were obviously skewed by preconception. Franz Boas was a
physicist, trained in Germany a generation before Einstein. His doctoral
studies concerned the optical properties of water, and throughout his
investigations his research was plagued by problems of perception, which
came to fascinate him. In the eclectic way of the best of nineteenth-century
scholarship, inquiry in one academic field led to another. What was the
nature of knowing? Who decided what was to be known? Boas became interested
in how seemingly random beliefs and convictions converged into this thing
called “
culture
,” a term that he was the first to promote as an
organizing principle, a useful point of intellectual departure. Far ahead of
his time, he sensed that every distinct social community, every cluster of
people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet
of the human legacy and its promise.
    Boas became the father of modern cultural
anthropology, the first scholar to attempt to explore in a truly open and
neutral manner how human social perceptions are formed, and how members of
distinct societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world.
Working first among the Inuit of Baffin Island and later along the Northwest
coast of Canada, he insisted that his students learn and conduct their
research in the language of the place and