SHADOWS IN THE SUN: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire

by Wade Davis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1998

The wonders of the diversity of various cultures and their relationship to their landscape--from the high Arctic and the northern forests to the swamps of the Orinoco--are hunted, gathered, and honestly appreciated here by the peripatetic Davis (One River, 1996). Davis is a sojourner in remote places. He tarries, hoping to get a taste of the intimate, deep reverence for the home place that indigenous people experience by staying put, to sample some of the mythopoetic associations and enigmatic happenings that spring like girls from the land for those who sit still long enough to witness. Here he recounts a dozen journeys, some in search of ethnobotanicals, some to expose himself to the poetics of a particular patch of ground, others to get a psychic education, as when he accompanies the Haitian Vodouns in their pilgrimage to sacred places, both terrestrial and ethereal. There is a good profile of Bruno Manser, a Swiss who went to live among Sarawak's Penan and joined them in their fight against the pillagers (many of them governmental) of their forest, thus becoming ""a fugitive straddling the cusp of cultures."" That same place, the shear zone, is inhabited by hamans, and Davis has been disturbed and fascinated in many of his travels by these men and women operating outside our familiar calculus of explanation. And as an ethnobotanist, he is drawn to the human potential unleashed by profoundly altered states--firewalking, slowing heartbeats to near imperceptible levels--and the psychotropics that serve as launch pads. One such hallucinogen comes from a monstrous toad that secretes a drug from glands on its head; it seems very handy for a quick slurp, but it turns out that you have to toke the toad to get the best buzz. Davis's lovely, cubist, rich landscape portraits are also topographies of the spirit, conveying a sense of place, but perhaps even more, the music of place.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998

ISBN: 1597263923

Page Count: 279

Publisher: Island

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998

Categories: NONFICTION