Catalogues of Culture

Every culture tries to answer a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In the Milton K. Wong Lecture, anthropologist Wade Davis explores some of the diversity of human culture, and considers what knowledge and expertise we lose by obliterating, or at best ignoring, traditional cultures. **This episode originally aired September 23, 2015.

HIGHLIGHT CLIP:The more languages and cultures that survive and thrive, the more hope there is for our collective future

Wade Davis has spent his career learning about diverse cultures around the world and writing and teaching about why experiencing and respecting as wide a range of tradition matters. In the Milton K. Wong Lecture he asks: what kind of a world do we want to live in? A world of monochromatic monotony? Or in one of a world of polychromatic diversity? You can guess right now which world he celebrates.