Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2016

The Current Transcript for October 24, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

The camp will go. Children will go missing. People will be deported. I don't think there will be a single person that's involved in this eviction that will not be completely scarred by the end.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Among the thousands of refugees French officials are forcing out of the camp they call “The Jungle” are unaccompanied minors. Many of them say they have relatives in Britain, but securing passage across the English Channel is not guaranteed. Their hope for entrance coincides with Brexit and Britain's views on its obligations to refugees and immigrants is divided. We're starting there today. And then, so many people from so many places create a cacophony of languages at Calais, enough to make you believe there is an endless mosaic of cultures in our world that is not necessarily so. Many distinctive languages are in fact disappearing.

SOUNDCLIP

When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet and of those 6,000 languages, fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children.

AMT: In an hour, anthropologist and long-time explorer at large, Wade Davis, joins me to share his concerns about cultures and ways of life that are vanishing. And things you can't say on radios.

SOUNDCLIP

Nobody even tells you when you were a kid what the words are that you're supposed to avoid. You have to say them to find out which ones they are.

AMT: Comedian George Carlin's famous seven dirty words riff is a lot older than the kids you might have in your backseat right now. But the taboo around swearing persists especially because of concern over what it will do to the children. Now some studies insist swearing cannot hurt so stop feeling guilty. You can hear that in half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Sting]

Back To Top »

Uncertainty looms for refugees as Calais camp dismantled

Guests: Jack Steadman, David Davies, Heaven Crawley

AMT: Well, the buses arrived early today ready to move the thousands of refugees from “The Jungle”— the sprawling squatters camp that has seen as many as 10,000 refugees and migrants living in improvised shacks and poor sanitation by the French port city of Calais. They’re from Syria, from Afghanistan, from African nations—many trying to cross illegally into Britain by stowing away on trucks and ferries. “The Jungle” has, more than any place else on the continent, come to stand as a symbol for Europe's refugee crisis. Jack Steadman is the field manager for the organization HelpRefugees at the Calais camp and that's where we have reached him. Hello.

JACK STEADMAN: Hi, Anna Maria. How are you doing?

AMT: Tell us what's happening this morning.

JACK STEADMAN: So, today is the first day of the evictions. For a long time, lots of people in this camp have—contrary to popular belief—quite a large percentage of the population does actually want to stay in France and the French government haven’t been coping with that. So today they've brought 50 buses which is about 3000—enough for about 3000 people and more than that amount of people, I estimate at least 40 per cent of the camp wants to stay in France and will happily get on those buses. So it's perhaps no surprise that today it's been relatively calm and it's just been lots and lots of people going to get a bus and they're happy that the French government is finally supplying them with some accommodation, you know, that's better than a tent. The only real problems we've had today is that there's been so many people going to the buses and the organization on that side of things has been pretty poor. We're getting a lot of mixed messages. The bureaucracy of it is kind of failing. But in the Jungle itself, things are kind of relatively calm.

AMT: So tell us about those who are unaccompanied minors who want to go to Britain. How many of them are there?

JACK STEADMAN: I don't have an exact number of the amount. I mean there’s 1,291 unaccompanied minors in the camp from our last census. I don't know exactly the number of those who want to go to the UK. I think 391 of them have a [unintelligible] family reunification in the UK. So far roughly 150 have been taken over by the Home Office. So we still got some way to go before all of those are processed and then there’s the Dubs children as well, who [unintelligible] have family that has been in Europe since before March 20th. But yeah, there's a lot of kids here and I mean maybe 500 of them will go to the UK legally and then the remaining 800 won't have the same kind of luxury of being offered that.

AMT: What is it that will allow them entry?

JACK STEADMAN: So either they qualify under Dublin III which means having immediate family: a mother, father, brother, sister, aunt and uncle, aunt or uncle in the UK, or they qualify under the Dubs amendment which was passed in May, in which case they've either got extended family in the UK or they've got a guardian there or they’ve got no family at all but it’s in their best interest to be in the UK and they've been in—they've also have to have been in Europe since before March the 20th this year.

AMT: How old are these kids?

JACK STEADMAN: The average age of children in the Jungle is about 14 years old. So they range anywhere from 10 years old to 17 years old.

AMT: And these would be unaccompanied minors.

JACK STEADMAN: Yeah.

AMT: And what has life been like for them in that camp?

JACK STEADMAN: I mean it's really hard to describe. It’s awful you know? They're living in shoddy tents, often with complete strangers. They're extremely vulnerable. And the French state is a signatory to the European Convention on the rights of the child. They should be protecting these children. So far they haven't done that. They're the most vulnerable people in Europe.

AMT: What is the fear for those who will not get to Britain? Where will they go? What's the concern about where they'll end up?

JACK STEADMAN: They will be made to stay in France. So far we've had zero provisions being outlined by the French state. They're going to be taking the kids when the camp’s cleared and then there's a sort of container camp which houses about 1,500 people that's being emptied today. So the kids are going to be housed there after the Jungle is destroyed and then eventually taken to specialized accommodation centres. But we don't know the details of those accommodations centres yet. And these kids are asking us every day what's going to happen to me? And honestly, we can’t tell them the answer because we don’t know them. The state won’t tell us. We’ve got volunteers here doing the job of two governments looking after the children and half of us, we’re you know builders or you know journalists or nurses. So you know we don't have experience doing this. We shouldn't be doing this, it should be the governments doing this.

AMT: How long have you been there, Jack?

JACK STEADMAN: I arrived last September, so 13 months now.

AMT: Why did you go?

JACK STEADMAN: I went because I was reading about it in the newspapers a lot and I saw a lot of my friends doing sad Facebook statuses about it. And I just didn't think anything's going to change if everybody posted how sad it is all the time and all the newspapers talk about how sad it is and nobody actually does anything. And then there was that photo of that boy Alan Kurdi and I just decided I had to do something. So I packed a van full of aid and drove down to Calais and I was planning on staying for a week, maybe two, and I'm here 13 months later.

AMT: And what have you learned in that time that you have been there that you want European governments and governments in North America to understand?

JACK STEADMAN: I can't remember who said it but it's something like a civilization is determined by how well it treats its children and elderly and the most vulnerable people in society. And there are 70-year- old men, there’s 10-year-old boys here, there’s heavily pregnant women, there's disabled kids. And nobody is looking after them except volunteers who've given up their jobs to come down here and be here for them and it's just a total disgrace. You know Europe likes to think that it's extremely civilized but it's shown that that's not true with the way that it's treated the people here. I don't know, I think history is going to look back on the way that Europe has treated as refugees unkindly. I don't think we're going to be reflected very well in the way that we've dealt with this at all.

AMT: Well, because you are right in that camp as they prepare to move people out and demolish it, what do you see as the best solution for going forward for those thousands of migrants and refugees?

JACK STEADMAN: I think for a lot of people, the best solution is to stay in France. For a 12-year-old boy with an uncle in the UK is in his best interest to be there. So we're going to keep advocating for the British government to be doing more on that front. In terms of what the government should be doing better, I just don't think this place should have been allowed to exist. I don't think that in 2016, in Europe, in northern France, that a slum like this should be allowed to exist again.

AMT: Jack Steadman, thank you for your perspective on all of this.

JACK STEADMAN: That’s okay. Thanks, Anna Maria.

AMT: Jack Steadman is the field manager for the group HelpRefugees at the Calais camp and that's where we reached him, at that port city in France. As you heard, the United Kingdom has agreed to take in about 300 unaccompanied children from the Calais camp who have family ties in the UK. And under what is called the Dub's amendment, another 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children are supposed to be allowed to go to the UK from Europe. So far around 50 unaccompanied minors have arrived in the UK from Calais. Some MPs have been raising questions about whether these refugees are actually under 18 years of age. David Davies is a Conservative MP from South Wales and he joins us from London. Hello.

DAVID DAVIES: Hello.

AMT: What are your concerns about child refugees who will go to the UK from Calais?

DAVID DAVIES: Well, I don't have any concerns about child refugees coming to the UK. I think it's very important that we fulfill our obligation to bring in children who are under the age of 18 and who have close family connections here. Obviously we do need to make sure that we don't do anything that is going to encourage people across the world to simply send children off by themselves towards Calais in the hope that they'll make it to the UK because that will simply add to the misery. But obviously it's government policy and policy which I fully support to ensure we help children and we need to make sure it is children we're helping and that other people are not pushing those children to one side in order to get to the front of the queue.

AMT: So you are concerned that they aren't actually all minors. Am I right?

DAVID DAVIES: Well, not all of them. I mean it's generally accepted that people who are in that camp are quite desperate to get to the UK. I mean that's why they're there. And you know clearly people who are willing to throw themselves onto moving lorries would be happy to give incorrect information about their age if it helps their case. And I think that's been accepted anyway by charity workers and in fact by other organizations. So the question isn't whether that happens, it’s how do we make sure that we prioritize help towards refugee children and not towards people who don't really have a claim?

AMT: And how do you propose to do that?

DAVID DAVIES: Well, obviously I suggested that if somebody looks significantly older than 18, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to ask them to undergo a few medical checks because apart from anything else, if somebody comes in age 27 claiming to be 17, then they have to be treated as a child and they can be put into a foster home with other children or into a school classroom and that raises other child protection risks. The general view at the moment is anyone should be given the benefit of the doubt whatever. I think I'd go along with that to a point. But I think where somebody is absolutely clearly over the age of 18 or appears to be over the age of 18, well, over the age of 22 say, then I think that's when you might start to ask questions because all of the medical checks are accurate to within about four years. So you have to give some leeway.

AMT: And what kind of medical checks are you talking about?

DAVID DAVIES: Well, I don't know why people got very excited about the tooth check, tooth x-rays which are already done, I think in North America, possibly not in Canada but certainly the United States, Australia and 16 other European countries. But I think you can also do it using a wrist scan as well. Basically it's about looking at bone structure.

AMT: So you're asking for dental x-rays or wrist scans for bones?

DAVID DAVIES: I'm saying that if somebody looks at—given that these tests, as I understand it, according to the British Dental Authority, they’re only accurate to within four years. So I'm suggesting that if somebody looks significantly older than 22, then it's not unreasonable to ask that. People are getting very excited about this. My aim is exactly in line with the government’s, which is to ensure that child refugees are prioritized and brought into the UK where they have a valid claim, but that we don't simply open up the gates to anyone who wants to come. We don't have a situation where people in their late twenties say well, I'm 13 so prove it differently, and I'm coming in whether you like it or not and I want placing in a foster home. I mean I just don't think that that's reasonable. I don't think it’s reasonable to expect that. If we do that, it's going to undermine confidence in the system and possibly make it harder to help people in the future.

AMT: Let me just ask you: have there been cases where 27 year olds are posing as 15 year olds?

DAVID DAVIES: There’s certainly been cases where people who've been adults have posed as children in order to get into the UK. Yes.

AMT: And how many? Like a lot?

DAVID DAVIES: I don’t know but it certainly happened. It certainly happened. There’s a case in the constituency at the moment where I represent this ongoing. It’s happened in the rest of the country as well. It's recognized as something that does happen and in fact why wouldn't it happen? If you were desperate to get into the United Kingdom, you would do the same. The BBC actually did a very interesting program called More or Less which is available on podcast—I don’t know if it's in Canada or not—showing that the apparent huge spike in 16- and 17-year-old males in Sweden is probably not down to the fact that there are unusually large numbers of men coming in at that age, but down to the fact that the people from Afghanistan who go to Sweden will not normally get asylum if they're over the age of 18 whereas people from Syria will. So the More or Less team who are economists and statisticians looked at this and concluded that’s almost certainly because people who are desperate to come to Europe will obviously give incorrect information about their age if they have to.

AMT: Okay. So you know that in your country, you've been called racist for this by some critics. How do you respond to that?

DAVID DAVIES: Well, I think it's disappointing because I've been called all sorts and I've had death threats as well. But the problem is that what they're doing is they're shutting down a debate that we need to have. There are people—can I—I mean I don't want to change the subject here but we just had a big and controversial debate about whether or not Britain should stay within the European Union and Britain voted to come out. A lot of people are very surprised by that and that's because we have a kind of a—sort of a limit on what you can say in public before people start shouting abuse at you and suggesting you're an extreme right wing Nazi, whatever, and one of those things is the European Union, another is the whole issue of immigration. And I think people are in for a wakeup call here because a lot of members that—most members of the public are not racist. They want to help refugees.

AMT: Okay. Well, David—

DAVID DAVIES: And they will support what the government is doing. But if you start shouting that they're racist whenever they raise concerns, then the danger is you stifle the conversation that we need to have.

AMT: Okay. Well, Mr. Davies, I appreciate that. We'll hear from our next person waiting. Thank you.

DAVID DAVIES: Okay, thanks.

AMT: David Davies is a Conservative MP from South Wales. He joined us from London, England. The scrutiny of young migrants arriving in the UK has been intense, so intense that in fact late last week, one small group of arrivals covered their faces in blankets rather than face the media as they left a bus in London. They may be forced from their own homes by war in desperation but it seems they found themselves in the middle of Europe's heated internal politics and you just heard reference to it now. Heaven Crawley is the chair in international migration for the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University in the UK. She happens to be in Turin, Italy today. Hello to you.

HEAVEN CRAWLEY: Good morning.

AMT: Well, first of all, what do you think of dental x-ray checks or wrist scans to ensure that people coming over are indeed minors?

HEAVEN CRAWLEY: Well, I think there's a couple of things to say. The first is to say that Mr. Davies was implying that this was an entirely reasonable and well-informed discussion. And I would wish that it was, but unfortunately last week we had anything but that because this topic has become politically very contentious, to the extent that we had a British newspaper put the images of 18 unaccompanied children on their front page virtually, using facial recognition technology that's really just for a play online app and claiming that those children are adults and I think that's highly risky in terms of their own safety. And I think when we start to think there's a technological fix to a difficult issue like this and start to look at things like dental x-rays or these wrist scans, the reality is that children don't have a date of birth through their bones like a sort of stick of rock. But actually children develop mentally, have all sorts of different backgrounds and history. We know even from our own kids being in school that kids can look very different sizes, let alone when they're coming from these very different backgrounds ethnically and culturally. So I think the problem here is this has become very politically contentious. But also that people are looking for quick technological fixes to something that's actually quite a complicated problem.

AMT: And he makes the point that there are cases of people claiming to be minors, that this is a contentious issue in Britain. Would you agree?

HEAVEN CRAWLEY: Well, I've been doing research on this issue since the mid-2000s, so it's certainly the case that the Home Office has disputed large numbers of children who are coming in and claiming to be children and claiming that they're adults. But many of those age disputes have been contested in the courts and elsewhere and in fact the Home Office has been accused on many occasions of not giving children the benefit of the doubt. And whilst Mr. Davies is right to point out that you don't want to put an adult into a children's situation, our experience from the evidence is actually the reverse is more likely to happen, that children are being put into adult situations whether that's detention or adult accommodation. And they’re of course at a lot more risk because there is no supervision whereas at least an adult in a children's situation is a supervised context. So I think it's really important to weigh up all these different factors but also to try and take out some of the political heat from this issue and to look at the evidence because so often the evidence actually gets ignored.

AMT: Let's talk about the political heat. He mentioned Brexit. He mentioned the concern that he's being shut down. How do you respond to that? You are in the midst of a different kind of relationship with Europe right now.

HEAVEN CRAWLEY: Yeah, I mean I would say and I've said for a long time—I’ve been working on this issue for nearly 25 years—that a lot of what the debate on migration is about isn't really about migration. It's about what it's come to represent in the UK. It's become very symbolic and a very potent political symbol. And if you start to look at some of the facts of what's going on, you'll see why. So Mr. Davies talked about 50 children coming so far to the UK. Probably about 90,000 unaccompanied children in Europe right now. So the figures are absolutely tiny and even in Calais, where we have this huge media storm today around the you know the camp being dismantled and 6,500 thousand people being dispersed, 1.3 million people arrived in Europe this year looking for protection. So the fact that these figures are so small but are raising such political heat tells you that this is about something more than just the issue of migration. It’s about what it represents in terms of national identity, borders, confidence in the government even, because a lot of what the Brexit was about was that, I suspect. So unfortunately children from these backgrounds, but refugees in general get caught up in this much bigger political debate and I don't think it does them and certainly not us either any good.

AMT: So what will happen to all these children?

HEAVEN CRAWLEY: Well, at the moment, as was said earlier by one of your speakers, some of those kids will come to the UK. Some of them will find themselves dispersed in France and they'll maybe look for other ways. And of course we have this bigger issue about all the kids that are in Europe and indeed not just the kids, the fact that there are so many people looking for protection. I have a big report coming out next week being launched in Brussels where we've been looking at the reasons why people have come to Europe. And unfortunately we still have a really strong perception or misperception in Europe that people are coming out of choice, when the drivers of migration to Europe in terms of conflict and persecution are really very clear and very stark. So I think, I mean politically we need to have a much more pragmatic response not just to the children's situation but in general. This is a kind of reality we need to wake up to and start to deal with in a different way.

AMT: Heaven Crawley, thank you for your thoughts on all of this.

HEAVEN CRAWLEY: Thank you.

AMT: Heaven Crawley, chair in international migration at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University. She happens to be in Turin, Italy today. Well, let us know what you think as you listen to this. You can tweet us, we are @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our site www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. If you're joining us partway through, you can download the podcast to hear the whole thing. The news is next. And then, What the F—that’s the title of a new book by a cognitive scientist delving into what swearing and swear words reveal about ourselves. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

Back To Top »

Cognitive scientist celebrates profanity, argues swearing a primal skill

Guests: Benjamin Bergen, Dr. Richard Stephens

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, we're well aware of the ecological damage being done to the globe and the knock-on effects we're all likely to feel someday. But anthropologist Wade Davis says the cultural life of our planet is also under assault. He's spent more than a decade travelling the globe to visit the peoples, cultures, and languages in danger of extinction, and he’ll join me in half an hour. First up though, a slightly less endangered kind of language.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Applause]

You know, that's the trouble with it, is trying to decide what to call these words, man. I'm trying to decide what to call this whole thing. You know, what are these words that I'm talking about? They're just words that we've decided well, we won’t use them all the time. Sometimes well, hell yeah. Sometimes it's okay but not all the time. And they're the only words that seem to have that restriction. I mean there are a lot of words you can say whenever you want, you know? Pneumonia. Nobody gives you a lot of... Alright, you can't yell it in the hospital a great deal, but what the hell.

AMT: Well, George Carlin's famous seven dirty words were taboo way back in 1972 and though the world may have changed a lot since then, those seven dirty words are still taboo today. But have you ever stopped to wonder why? Dirty words, as they're called, might not make for polite conversation but my next guest believes that studying them can reveal a lot about ourselves. Benjamin Bergen is a professor of cognitive science and the author of a new book called What the F: What Swearing Reveals about Our Language, Our Brains and Ourselves. He's in San Diego, California. Hello.

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Hi there.

AMT: You self-identify as a fan of swearing and you use profanity in the book. Why?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, profanity is the way that we are able to communicate our strongest emotions most immediately and like the rest of language, it has its place in the ecosystem of communication. And I guess my interest is in discovering how humans are able to transmit their thoughts through time and space to other people. Profanity is one of the most revealing ways that we do that.

AMT: What makes swear words distinct from other words?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, in large part, it's our personal history with them as children. These are the words that we're told you can't say them in public, you can't say them around adults, you can't say them around kids and we're punished for them. And that history with those words, that personal history with this type of language, is what creates for us these strong taboos about using them in public and creates the strong physiological reactions that we have to them.

AMT: Hmm. What does the profanity in a language say about the culture?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, it's sort of a record of the things that a particular group of people over time have felt are taboo. So in the deep history of English and in many other languages, it's the religious terminology that is most offensive in large part because of a long history of interaction with religious concepts. And so the idea of taking religious terminology out of the church or out of the synagogue or out of wherever one prays and using it in other ways, blaspheming, is a very strong taboo and we still have that with us in many, many Western languages. In Italian for example, in Spanish, many of the strongest words are drawn from religious terminology but as a culture changes, as it turns away from say religion as many Western cultures have in the last say century, you find that other words become promoted to be the strongest words because the taboos around them are strongest. Victorian ideas about sexuality have led to a century or two of very strong taboos about sexual terminology in English for example.

AMT: And in fact yeah, we are at the point where certain words that were perfectly acceptable at one time are absolutely unacceptable today.

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, there's this cultural change happening and we see this especially strongly with younger Americans. I don't know whether it's happening with younger Canadians too. But when you survey young Americans, you find that they don't find that most of Carlin's seven words are really the worst words of the language anymore. The ones that they find most offensive are slurs that are derogatory towards people by their ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation and so on. And that means that many words that at one time were general terms of insult have come to be relatively offensive terms of abuse for younger Americans.

AMT: Hmm. What does swearing reveal about the way our brain works?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, certain uses of profanity trigger a different suite of biological actions than the rest of language. When you hear the strongest words of your language, the strongest profane words, there are changes in your physiology that happen immediately. Your heart rate increases, blood flows to your extremities, your palms start sweating. It's part of what some people think is what we call fight or flight response. And it's possible that these words because we're told they're taboo from early on, because we believe that there's some violation of a social norm that happens when they're used, that they trigger a physiological reaction that's different from the rest of language. And of course the brain systems that support this physiological reaction are different from the rest of language.

AMT: You've made the point that when brain damage affects the ability to speak, profanity is spared.

BENJAMIN BERGEN: In many cases. Yeah, we've known this for 150 years that people who suffer stroke or traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer's, and who have damage to their principal language centres, nevertheless oftentimes preserve the capacity to swear spontaneously. So this dissociation between the two capacities and the different systems of the brain that must be supporting them, points us in the direction of a different assembly line for profanity, at least spontaneous profanity, than the rest of language.

AMT: Hmm. Fascinating. Benjamin Bergen, stay with us. I'm going to come back to you. I want to bring in someone else who studies swearing. He's conducted research into swearing when we are in pain. Dr. Richard Stephens is a psychologist and lecturer at Keele University in Staffordshire, UK. That's where we have reached him. Hello.

RICHARD STEPHENS: Hello.

AMT: What first triggered your interest in the link between swearing and pain?

RICHARD STEPHENS: Well, as a psychologist and researcher, you know you can't help but kind of apply that same mindset to more everyday masses. And I noticed that if I was doing something with a hammer and I happened to whack myself on the finger, if I swore for a few minutes you know not necessarily shouting and screaming, just repeated a swear word a few times, you know in a very calm way, that seemed to help a little bit. And when my daughter was born, it was very long and difficult labour. And towards the end when the contractions were coming on very strongly, my wife was quite impressive actually in the range of swearing that she let fly with only to be rather embarrassed as the contractions returned to normal as she went through. And the midwife sort of said you know you don't need to be embarrassed, this swearing is a completely normal part of giving birth. Nearly everybody does it. And that really piqued my interest. And when I got back to work, I started to think about it in a more psychological way.

AMT: Did swearing seem to help your wife with the pain?

RICHARD STEPHENS: Well, it's funny. When we started doing the research, there was virtually nothing written about swearing and pain in the psychology literature. And some people I spoke to thought that swearing might actually make the pain worse. In researching pain, there's a phenomenon called catastrophizing. This is the extent to which a person understands that an injury that they've had or a painful situation they’re in, the extent to which it's threatening their very existence and someone that catastrophized a lot would think that you know a small pain you know could be life threatening. So we thought swearing might actually be catastrophizing, which would suggest catastrophizing is a bad thing to do when you're in pain, which would suggest that the pain would be worse. So I thought you know I had to think to myself, whenever I get pain I want it to go away so if I’m swearing, it’s presumably to try and make it better, you know not worse.

AMT: So how did you design a study to test the relationship between swearing and pain?

RICHARD STEPHENS: So my students and I you know set about to do just that and what quickly became apparent was a really good way to test pain in the laboratory is an ice cold water challenge because putting your hands in ice cold water, it isn't harmful if you only do it for a few minutes yet it is incredibly painful. So you can do pain research ethically using this method. So we've got people to basically put their hands in buckets of very cold water and repeat a swear word. To try to make the test as fair as possible, we had them articulating neutral words as a comparison. So they're still speaking and getting whatever distraction that saying something brings—a word to describe a table actually. So there they were in the lab, either repeating a swear word of their choice or a word that might describe a table. And across several of those studies now, we always show that on average there's a benefit to swearing: people can hold their hands in the water, tolerate the pain for longer.

AMT: Hmm. What did you find in your follow up study when you asked people how much they swore in their regular lives?

RICHARD STEPHENS: That's exactly right. So you know that's the kind of the next question is: well, does it matter how much you swear in daily life, how much benefit you get when you swear when you're in pain? So we did the study again, but this time we got people to give us estimates of how many times they swear a day. It's a difficult thing to measure psychologically with any accuracy. But people had a go and I guess people that swear a fair bit gave a higher number than people that don't swear very much. And when we kind of looked at that again, we found that the people who swear the least in everyday life get the most benefit from swearing in this ice water experiment. So that speaks to the idea of—there’s a psychological idea called habituation. And this is the idea that you know we just get used to things and kind of stop seeing them and stop feeling them. And so if you swear a lot, you become habituated to swearing, it's no big deal. And any of that kind of tabooness and emotional punch that Ben was talking about you know no longer works so well.

AMT: So interesting. Now do you swear?

RICHARD STEPHENS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean less than I used to, now that I’m a bit older and a bit more responsible in my life. But yeah, I think it's—I mean there was a really neat study last year or the year before, which looked at people's general colour vocabulary compares with swearing vocabulary. And there’s a correlation. The people who've got the best general vocabulary also have the best swearing vocabulary, which kind of [unintelligible] the idea that swearing is not a sign of inarticulateness and low IQ. Swearing is a form of language, like Ben was saying it kind of exists for a reason, it's all around emotion. And you know we're all emotional beings and sometimes we need to express emotion in the best way we can.

AMT: So there you go, it can help your vocabulary and it can reduce the pain or at least allow you to put up with pain. Richard Stephens, thank you.

RICHARD STEPHENS: Thanks very much.

AMT: That's Dr. Richard Stephens. He's a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Keele and he joined us from Staffordshire, UK. Benjamin Bergen is still with us. He is the author of What the F. And okay, so Benjamin Bergen, aside from helping us cope with pain, what are some of the other benefits of swearing?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, the ones that have been hypothesized that I think are most exciting are kind of along the same lines. They have to do with catharsis in general. Interestingly, we don't really have any empirical evidence for this yet. There's basically just anecdotal evidence. So many people report that you know for example if they're driving on the highway and someone cuts them off in traffic that a well- articulated four letter word allows them to alleviate some of the anger that would otherwise come out in the form of aggression using the vehicle. But like I said, we don't actually know. What we do know is that people use profanity in lots of pro-social ways to make connections with other people. Lots of comedy of course uses taboo language to create informality and the connection with other people. People use it in workplaces in particular to again make the interactions seem less formal and to cement inter individual relations. So there's a lot of things that people use profanity for, aside from merely expressing aggression.

AMT: And context is important when we talk about language. We might not expect swearing from prominent leaders in public at least. It is pretty common among teenagers and we asked an 18 year old in Vancouver to tell us about her swearing. Listen to her.

SOUNDCLIP

I swear when my sister makes me mad. Like a big thing is when she takes my stuff. Like it affects me so much like I get very, very like I'm like oh my god, like I can't find my stuff for work. I won't have the outfit that I was picturing. I'll make it so much more dramatic by swearing. Like I'll be like, like oh my gosh, she doesn't [beep] care about my feelings, like she [beep] runs my life or something. Like I'll just be kind of—I'll be very, very mad and I'll swear when I hurt myself. Like oh, like somebody like bumped into me, like I’ll be like oh my god, they're like not [beep] watching their way. Like I'll make something so much bigger than it is just to make it not an ordinary occurrence but something more interesting. Like if—I also swear when I get really excited about a story or try to obviously make it bigger than it is so that it's a more interesting story. So like if something happened you know ordinarily in the mall or something, I would swear to make it funnier or swear to make it more interesting. And yeah. And I mean like sometimes I'll take it too far where someone is like okay, like you got to—it also depends who you're talking with. Some people will tolerate it and swear as much as you will and some other people will kind of judge you. Yeah, just like okay, you got to like tone it down a little and I'm like okay yeah, sorry. But like obviously when I get excited about something, I’ll unintentionally do it.

AMT: Okay, Benjamin Bergen, we beeped out—you got it on your cover of your book—but we beeped out the F word there. What do you think of what she just said?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, she is exactly right. There's a whole range of uses that people put profanity to. And one thing that I want to highlight is that she talks about sometimes these words coming out spontaneously, unintentionally, and sometimes they come out intentionally. Sometimes there's some social work that you want to do with them. That's a different type of swearing than the spontaneous swearing that happens when you maybe are in the middle of giving childbirth, which is where you have a little bit less control and a little bit less intention. And those two different types of profanity actually get generated via different brain pathways: one, using this spontaneous old system for emotion, regulation and action selection, the other, the new systems of the brain that do the rest of language. So I think that's fascinating that she figured out that there are these two different ways that language like this is produced.

AMT: So should parents give up trying to get their kids to stop swearing?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, you know I have a kid and my observation has been that the more you ban something, the more you tell him not to do it, the more exciting it is to try to do it. In general, parents try to regulate profane language in the home by a couple of different strategies: one is just to ban it and punishment might come with that and that's the best way to make sure that those words are very, very powerful. That's for example the childhood experience that I had, and look, I wrote a book about profanity. It didn't stop me. Other parents adopt a sort of libertarian strategy: just ignore it, let whatever happens happen. That's an okay approach. The problem is that kids will do whatever they are allowed to do and may not learn all the consequences that using strong language might have. So I've sort of adopted a middle strategy, which is you know I don't censor myself, my wife doesn't censor herself and we don't censor the kid as long as it's just again these run of the mill profanities. We don't really allow slurs in our house and that's a different issue and we don't allow abuse, abusive language, calling people by names and so on. We do explain to him what the invisible social rules are that he might not get because the social world is really complicated.

AMT: And how much run of the mill profanity do you use around your son?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Do I? It's probably every day. I mean there are lots of things that are frustrating when you have a two year old at home. For example, naptime or the absence of naptime and every once in a while, one is cheering for a football team or a baseball team that actually wins a game and that can lead to profanity. Those are things that I would say on a daily basis, there's probably a run of the mill profanity in our home around the kid and he hasn't yet—his head hasn't yet fallen off.

AMT: Okay. Well, as you know, the American Academy of Pediatrics discourages swearing in front of children. We spoke with Dr. Michael Yogman of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Listen to what he says.

SOUNDCLIP

On this issue, I think let's rely on common sense. How would one go about studying the impact of parents swearing in front of their children and I think it’d be a little hard to do a randomized control trial of that. So I don't think science is going to answer the question. I think science certainly answers the question about whether children model on their parents’ behaviour. We know they do. We know that learning to talk civilly with children really helps their social relations later on. And I think that we've got far too much anger and hate speech and bullying in our culture right now. And as pediatricians, I feel quite strongly that it's important for us to kind of tone that down and encourage more civil discourse.

AMT: Okay. Before we talk about what he says, we also spoke to the president elect of the Canadian Pediatric Society, Dr. Mike Dickinson, and this is his take on swearing in front of kids.

SOUNDCLIP

Kids are smart, you know? Older kids realize what's acceptable in the home environment and what's acceptable in the school environment. But wherever possible, you know when there's consistency across different environments, I think that just makes life easier.

AMT: Okay, so two leading pediatricians advising some caution about exposing kids to profanity. What do you think of that?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, I think it's important to highlight exactly what they are saying. They're saying that bullying, hate speech and verbal aggression are harmful and there's no doubt whatsoever. But that's sort of beside the point. Right? That's not to say that profanity itself is harmful and that as you said, there are no randomized controlled trials demonstrating that it does cause harm. And if you actually run the argument down a little bit, you just sort of figure out well, what are the possible consequences? The main possible consequence of using profanity around the home, again not verbal abuse, again not slurs, is that children might learn that their parents use these words. I think it's actually giving children too little credit to say that they can't learn that there are different behaviours appropriate for different contexts. I mean potty training for example, which most children go through around two years of age, is exactly that. There are certain contexts in which this particular behaviour is acceptable: notably the toilet or maybe a tree. There are lots of other environments that it's not acceptable, for example on the couch or the middle of your preschool classroom. In fact, children who grow up bilingual do this with language from a very early age. They learn that this is the language that we speak at home and it's a completely separate language altogether that we speak in public. So to my mind because there's no evidence of harm of profanity per se, to go ahead and use your better judgment as a parent is probably the best advice.

AMT: Would kids even know how to swear if it weren't for adult reaction?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, they wouldn't know that the words were bad, right? They wouldn't know that there's a social agreement, that this particular word is a troubling one, right? Which is exactly the point. We're creating bad words in the minds of our children exactly by our reaction to them. If we were just to let it be water under the bridge and allow those things to happen and explain what the other consequences might be in different environments, then they wouldn't think that they were as powerful as we make them believe them to be.

AMT: How do you think our ideas about swearing, profanity and slurs will continue to evolve?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, we are seeing that there's just more and more profanity out there. And one consequence of that is that people's attitudes towards strong words are changing. One large survey of North American young adults found that the F-word isn't even in the top 10 most offensive words of English anymore. So what we're seeing is a shift away from those words, which are relatively arbitrarily selected to be taboo, and towards feeling that the words that are most offensive are in fact words that are used to cause harm. And that change is most likely going to continue as our cultural attitudes continue to become more sensitive to individuals and their desires and how they want to be called.

AMT: So do you think we'll ever reach a place where no words will be seen as profane or taboo or will they just—new words will take their place?

BENJAMIN BERGEN: You know it's certainly possible and certainly over the course of some cultures, it has happened. In the case of continental French, there are strong words in French but those strong words are not judged to be as damaging, as harmful, as believable as the equivalents are in English. So you can hear the strongest words of French on television at any hour of the day and used in front of children. So it's certainly possible. Not being a Futurist, I can't necessarily tell you where we're going to go.

AMT: So you're not going to predict who comes after you and writes a book that doesn't have a big F on the cover, but the whole word there? [laughs]

BENJAMIN BERGEN: Well, certainly that word—that's a pretty obvious prediction—the F word has had its day in the sun. There's no doubt that certainly within the century and probably far earlier than that, that word is going to be showing up on the CBC.

AMT: Okay. Well, we’ll leave it there. We'll wait to see that happen. Benjamin Bergen, thank you.

BENJAMIN BERGEN: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much.

AMT: Benjamin Bergen, professor of cognitive science and the author of What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains and Ourselves. He's in San Diego. We want to hear from you on this topic. What are your ideas about swearing or not swearing around your children? Has your own use of profanity changed with children? Send us a polite email, please, polite. Go to our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. We are also on Facebook and we're on Twitter @thecurrentCBC. And stay with us, coming up in our next half hour, Wade Davis has visited most every point on the globe you can imagine, many you've never heard of. He's an anthropologist, an explorer and he's going to talk about the fascinating peoples and cultures he has encountered and his concerns about the extinction of language and cultures. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on www.cbc.ca/thecurrent.

Back To Top »

Anthropologist Wade Davis on disappearing world cultures

Guests: Wade Davis

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current. You don't meet too many explorers these days, but for 13 years that was Wade Davis’ gig. He traveled the world as an explorer-in-residence for National Geographic, not searching for undiscovered lands but documenting and experiencing cultures which are in danger of disappearing. In addition to being an explorer, Wade Davis is a professor of anthropology at UBC, University of British Columbia. He's an author, a filmmaker, a photographer and his latest book is Wade Davis: Photographs. It's a collection of pictures from his journeys and as you're listening you can visit our website to see a few of them at www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Wade Davis joins us from Vancouver. Hello.

WADE DAVIS: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: Your role as explorer-in-residence for National Geographic, which I have to say is the best job ever, was to change the way the world values and views culture. Why is that so important?

WADE DAVIS: Well, that grew out of the Geographic's commitment to conservation. As they turned into their second century, they very overtly decided that if their mission in the first 100 years had been to help you know the world, in the second century, their mission would be to help you save the world in a sense. And so they brought on the seven original explorers-in-residence, each one of which sort of had some specialty. Bob Ballard for deep-water exploration, Sylvia Earle, the early great oceanographer, Jane Goodall, and they brought me on as the social anthropologist because they were very aware in part from some things I had written for them about the sort of hidden backdrop of our age. The fact that by complete academics consensus of the 7,000 languages spoken the day that most of us were born, fully half aren't being whispered in the ears of infants and they're literally on the brink of extinction. And since a language of course is not just vocabulary or grammar, it's sort of the flash of the human spirit. It's a way that the essence of a culture comes in the material world. To lose half the languages of humanity is to lose half of humanity's ecological, spiritual, social knowledge in a generation. And this of course doesn't have to happen.

AMT: Talk to me a little bit more about this, the role of language and the parallel to cultures disappearing.

WADE DAVIS: Well, there's no—you know in a sense on one level, the loss of language becomes sort of the canary in the coal mine, letting us know what's happening to cultural diversity in general around the world. And one of the reasons this is so particularly poignant at this point in time, is that it’s happening in the very generation in which geneticists have finally proven it to be true, something philosophers have always hoped to be true, and that is a fact that we're all brothers and sisters. And I don't mean that in the spirit of hippie ethnography, I mean quite literally in this last generation, studies of the human genome have left no doubt that it's a single continuum, that we're all cut from the same genetic cloth, that race is an utter fiction. And what this means of course, is that all human cultures share the same genius and whether that genius is expressed in technological wizardry, which has been our great achievement, or by contrast placed into the task of unraveling the threads of memory inherent in a myth, it's simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation. This is really, really important because it affirms a central revelation of anthropology which was really brought into being by the great anthropologist Franz Boas and that's of course cultural relativism, the idea that the world into which you were born doesn't exist in some absolute sense but it's just one model of reality, the consequence of one set of choices your culture made. But the other peoples of the world aren't failed attempts of being new or failed attempts of being modern. Every culture is a unique answer to that fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? And when the peoples of the world answer that question, they do so in the 7,000 different languages of humanity. And what that really means is that every culture has something to say, each has an equal claim to reality just as none has a monopoly on the route to the divine. Each has something to say. Each deserves to be heard.

AMT: Well, let's talk about some of the cultures you feature because it is so important to look at the cultures when we talk about the language. You’ve spent a lot of time in Tibet. What is it about this culture that stays with you?

WADE DAVIS: The idea we had is to change the way the world viewed and valued culture, we would take our global audience of the Geographic to places around the world where the cultural expressions were so dazzling, so remarkable that you couldn't help but come away with a new sense of the value of culture. So we didn't just go out to the field to sort of celebrate the exotic other as some traditional you know ethnographic films have done. We specifically went to places that had lessons to say, so in the case of Tibet, you know the fascinating thing I guess was perhaps best distilled by a Lama in Tibet who once said to me you know we in Tibet don't believe that you went to the moon but you did. You may not believe that we achieve enlightenment in one lifetime but we can. And so in a sense, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition has devoted and the reason we called the film we made the Science of the Mind is because what is science but the empirical pursuit of the truth? And what is Tibetan Buddhism but 2,500 years of direct empirical observation as to the nature of mind? I mean Buddhism is less a religion or a philosophy than it is simply a path, a path of illumination. And the four Noble Truths, you know all life is suffering, that doesn’t mean all life is negation. It means that terrible things happen in life, cause of suffering is ignorance. That's not stupidity. It's the tendency of people to cling to the cruel illusion of our own centrality in the stream of Divine Existence. The third of the Noble Truths is the revelation that ignorance can be overcome and the fourth and the most consequential and practical sense is the delineation of an actual spiritual practice, a contemplate of practice if pursued, not only has the possibility of a transformation of the human heart, but has 2,500 years of evidence that transformation will happen. You know we spend all of our time in the West trying to ignore a moment that the Tibetans spend all of their lifetimes trying to understand, and that of course is death.

AMT: Is our Western culture imposing its own traditions on those traditions though? Do you see that as a danger? Do you see that as a normal way of things? Do you see that as something that contributes to that loss of language?

WADE DAVIS: I think you know it's not the traditional versus the modern. It’s kind of about the rights of free people to choose the components of their lives and I don't think any anthropologist would be suggesting that anybody be kept from the genius of modernity or that any of the people in the so-called modern world go back to a pre-industrial past. The whole question is you know what kind of world do we want to live in? And how do we figure out a way that as we transition forward in the march of history, we can maintain the glory of the diversity which really is a sense of poetry of life itself?

AMT: Also I guess the point is to value cultures that are different and understand that they—as you make the point that you were told that we achieved enlightenment even though you didn't believe us.

WADE DAVIS: Well, yeah. Another story I tell in the book is about the wayfinders of Polynesia, where you know we can actually demonstrate that whereas at a time when European transports were hugging the shores of continents for fear of the open ocean until the British solved the problem of the longitude with the invention of the chronometer, we know by contrast that 10 centuries before Christ, the ancestors of the Polynesians set sail into the rising sun. And we can actually document, as we did in sailing on this wonderful vessel, the Hokulea, with the Polynesian Voyaging Society these young sailors who still use the traditional navigation techniques of their ancestors and the skill set is simply dazzling. And so you know that's part of what the book's all about. It's all trying to sort of take you to places that aren't vestigial. These aren't people disappearing. These are kind of dynamic cultures that are still very much wanting to be around the kind of the campfire, the human experience, and having their voices heard as we all figure out what kind of world we're going to leave to our children.

AMT: You think—what is it, is it the hubris of the European whites that has perpetuated this view that other cultures weren't ahead of the European-based culture?

WADE DAVIS: Well, you know anthropology or you know the very idea of culture really didn't really exist as an organizing principle until Franz Boas in the late 19th century. And anthropology itself didn't exist as a discipline until the late 19th century, really.

AMT: But the hubris was there.

WADE DAVIS: Oh, the hubris was there. And a lot of the way we looked at—because of the moment in time when you know European technological industrial achievements had given Europe, for a moment in time, such complete power. And remember that even the superiority of white European society, particularly the white male, was accepted at such a given in the 19th century that there wasn't even a word in the English language for what we would now call racism. And in the early years of anthropology, you know anthropologists inspired by Darwin and if species changed through time, what about cultures? And it developed the sort of evolutionary idea of culture that we sort of went from you know the savage to the barbarian, to the civilized to the strand of London. In other words, cultures around the world were seen as sort of set theatre pieces that represented sort of frozen moments in time in this imagined evolutionary ascent conveniently to ourselves. And that was actually the lens through which until Boas, you know anthropologists sort of viewed these “primitive” peoples of the world. And as anthropologists then began to go out into the field inspired by Boas and part of the things that Boas asked people to do was to suspend their own prejudices and that was what he was suggesting, you know it was really a shattering into the European mind. It was kind of like the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. And then as anthropologists went out, they realized there was actually no—once you weren't simply stacking the deck and measuring success by what made us successful, you suddenly realized that there was no reason whatsoever to use the word primitive as a descriptive term for any culture in the world and that really has been the gift of anthropology.

AMT: Another picture from the book jumped out at me: a group of people on top of a glacier with a cross. What's the ritual? Where are they?

WADE DAVIS: Yeah, that’s called Quyllurit'I, the Star Snow Festival in southern Peru and what it is in a nutshell, it's almost like a kind of an Indian Woodstock. I mean every year when the Pleiades emerged in the sky, thousands and thousands of people converge in a sacred valley called the Sinakara and it's a perfect expression of 500 years of Catholic faith on top of hundreds of years of pre-Columbian ideas. And so the basic ritual is that the crosses from the community are carried up into the sacred valley and then by a specialized group of men called pablitos, who are able to deal with the spirits of the dead that haunt the ice fields, they carry the crosses up into the ice, plant them for 48 hours and then the crosses sort of empowered by the power of the earth, by Pachamama, are then retrieved and brought back down to the communities, completing the kind of sacred cycle of the divine. I mean one of the reasons we made that film is that you know we always struggle you know why do we think about the earth? Why do we have this environmental crisis that we have? And part of it is that you know in our particular intellectual tradition, we kind of de-animated the world so that—for me I was raised as a Canadian kid to believe that a mountain was just a pile of dirt or rock ready to be mined. Well, that made me very different from those people in Peru who are literally raised to believe that a mountain is a deity, an Apus, divinity that will direct their destiny. And the important thing is not to say who's right and who's wrong. It's how the belief system mediates the relationship between the culture and the place, often with very profoundly different consequences for the ecological footprint.

AMT: There are cultural practices that are uncomfortable for us, take some of the things you document in New Guinea. Tell us about some of the practices that have developed.

WADE DAVIS: Well, I mean you know in New Guinea for example, in coming of age ceremonies there is a community called the Sambia who actually believe that for a young boy to become a man, he must be filled with semen to become in a sense, fertile. And so the initiation involves him basically committing fellatio repeatedly with the elder men in the initiation space, the hut if you will. And of course none of this has anything to do with pedophilia. None of this has anything to do with homosexuality. It's just the idea that they have. And so that's how the boy becomes fertile and capable of becoming a father. And once he comes of age, he of course becomes a father has a wife and life goes on. You know one of the things though, some traits of culture, I'm always asked this question, Anna Maria, you know does anthropology defend everything just because it exists? You know the classic example would be female circumcision and sort of extreme genital mutilation in some traditions in Africa for example. And it's important to realize and remember that anthropology never calls for the elimination of judgment. It just calls for the suspension of judgments, the very judgments that we’re kind of ethically and morally obliged to make as human beings can be informed ones. So you mean no one would hesitate to condemn the Nazis even though they had a religion and a worldview or whatever you want to say. But the anthropological lens is kind of more useful when it's pointed at something that we cast judgments about but about which we know very little and a great example of that would be voodoo which I also talk about in the book. You know when we think of voodoo as a black magic cult, material for you know Pulp Fiction and bad movies and so on. But you know then if I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what do you say? Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, whatever, but what continent’s left out? Sub-Saharan Africa, the tacit assumption being that African people had no religion. Of course they did. And voodoo is not a black magic cult. It's just a [unintelligible] from Dahomey that mean spirit or God and voodoo is just the religious world view that came over to the new world during the terrible slavery era.

AMT: You know we can't talk about Indigenous culture without talking about Canada. You've featured photos of the Inuit in the Arctic. How does this culture compare to the other disappearing cultures you document?

WADE DAVIS: Well, I think that the story of the Canadian Arctic is so poignant because you know when the British first arrived there, they took the Inuit to be savages. The Inuit took the British to be gods. Both were wrong. But the thing we often forget about the Inuit is how compressed the European experience has been for them. I mean in places like Igloolik, you know had very little sustained contact with European society until maybe the 1930s, maybe as much as the 1950s. And they had to deal with so much. You know obviously initially the diseases that swept through ultimately the culture of poverty, the residential schools, high rates of alcoholism and suicide. And out of all that kind of craziness came the glorious creation of Nunavut, the new homeland. And just as the Inuit again are on this edge of this fantastic Renaissance and an example to the world because you know these cultural processes are not always negative. They can be extraordinary glorious and uplifting. But now of course throughout the Arctic, they're dealing with a force beyond their capacity to control and deal with and that's climate change. And you know if you travel in the Arctic, it's so dramatic. I mean I have photographs in the book from Qaanaaq, the northernmost community in the world in northwest Greenland and the ice used to come in there in September and stay till July. Now it comes in November and is gone by March. I once flew across Smith Sound just 12 degrees south of the North Pole with a close friend of mine from Igloolik, Theo [unintelligible] who had done that journey with his dogs not too many years before and as he looked down at the open water of Smith Sound in April, he just began to weep. And he just said what became of the ice? And you know I've had Inuit friends say you know this is not our weather. We have robins in Igloolik. We don't even have a name for them birds. So if anyone—and one final point on climate change too is that you know for us, Anna Maria, climate change is either a technical challenge or an economic opportunity or a scientific debate if you will. But we forget for cultures that live so closely to the land and cultures who actually believe as many do that their rituals maintain the ecological harmony of the world. When something goes wrong, it's their fault. So for them, climate change is an existential challenge. It's a deep psychological blow. And so remember earlier in this conversation we spoke about that ritual of bringing the crosses to the glacier in Peru in the Andes. Well, the ultimate moment of that ritual always was the men would chip blocks of ice from those glaciers to take the mountain if you will back to the communities so that the elderly could partake in the final sort of cycle of the divine of the ritual. But because they witness a recession of those glaciers and because they think it must be their fault, they have unilaterally stopped that practice which is kind of moving because you know it's a trivial amount of ice they chip away but in their own terms of reference of who they are, in a sense are doing more about climate change in a way than we are. And they didn't cause it.

AMT: You speak of Indigenous culture including the Indigenous culture in Canada with such respect and interest. I was in Prince George earlier this month hosting a forum on missing and murdered Indigenous women and we had an interesting question from our audience at that event. I'm going to play it for you now.

SOUNDCLIP

What I wonder is if there are societies in the world that view their Indigenous populations on a higher level and treat them with better respect and dignity and if there are, can we learn from those societies and take those lessons back home to Canada?

AMT: Wade Davis, I thought that was a great question. Is there a country that Canada can learn from in terms of how Indigenous people and culture are revered?

WADE DAVIS: Well, I think, Anna Maria, we have to recognize that that nation states are never threatened by Indigenous people if those states are prepared to accept diversity. In fact they will realize that the Indigenous people enhance the nation state. Now Colombia is actually a good example. When I first lived there as a student in the 1970s, I was doing research with an extraordinary complex of peoples often called the Elder Brothers, the Kogi [unintelligible.] These are the people that live in this isolated volcanic massif that soars to 20,000 feet. They remain ruled in a bloodstained continent by a ritual priesthood. The training for the priesthood is astonishing and they speak in full paragraphs with great articulation about their absolute beliefs that their rituals maintain the cosmic balance of the world, the ecological balance. Now in the early seventies when I would go to visit those people, parents of my friends in Bogota would say, [Alternate language]. Why do you want to live with the dirty people? Well, now two generations later, the last five Colombian presidents as a first act of office, often even before their inauguration, is to go up to those mountains to seek the blessing of the mamos because that entire complex of people have emerged as a sort of symbol of continuity and hope in a country that's had so much agony.

AMT: So does the society also recognize that or are those the politicians? Are they being political or is it is it real?

WADE DAVIS: I think it's very real. I mean I think that the Kogi—it's not that there aren’t conflicts or challenges of you know land use and encroachment, of course that's going on, but there's no question that the Kogi and the Arhuaco have become symbolic in Colombia. And also in Columbia, a good friend of mine, Martin von Hildebrand was head of Indian affairs and Virgilio Barco, the president of Colombia said to him you know just do something for the Indians, as he put it. And in five remarkable years, Martin did more than something. He secured legal land tenure to an area collectively the size of the United Kingdom for 57 groups in the Northwest Amazon. And once they had their land, a whole renaissance of culture unfolded.

AMT: Because you know in this country, we will see our leaders have ceremonies and Indigenous blessings. What we don't see enough of in the—anyone in the Indigenous community will tell us this—is that we don't see enough respect for the people themselves for what they're going through, for what they can offer to the rest of society.

WADE DAVIS: Well, I think that you know that's our job and I think one of the unfortunate things about anthropologists in the academic world being effectively mute because of the kind of conventions of the academy, is that maybe we're not telling those stories powerfully enough to move the dial on the public discourse if you will. I'd like to think that you know Canada is making progress. We've got a long way to go. But compared to the world of my childhood when the residential schools were still thriving, no one questioned them, when you know when I would work in logging camps it was just an unwritten rule that no First Nation would ever get above the landing in a logging crew. I mean a lot's changed and we just have to keep pushing forward toward proper and complete justice for all First Nations people. I mean you know I tend—Anna Maria, maybe because I'm a dad, I don't know. I tend to be a real optimist because I just find that pessimism is an indulgence and despair is kind of an insult to the imagination. And you know my father always said just do what you need to do and then ask whether it was possible or permissible.

AMT: So we're almost out of time. What can a distant culture tell us about the way we live here and now in Canada in 2016?

WADE DAVIS: Well, I think it's not necessarily that they can tell us anything. People are always saying to me what does it matter to someone in Toronto if some tribal society in Africa disappears? Well, it probably doesn't mean anything to you in Toronto at one level but on the other hand, what would happen to that—how would that tribal society in Africa view the disappearance of Toronto? It probably wouldn't bother them too much, but I would argue that we're either—Toronto or that travel group to disappear—it would matter to humanity as a whole. You know the real question, as Margaret Mead said, you know what kind of world do we want to live in: a kind of monochromatic world of monotony or a polychromatic world of diversity? You know she said her greatest fear was that as we drifted toward the sort of blandly amorphous generic world, not only an entire range of the human imagination be reduced to a single modality of thought, we’d wake one day she said from a dream, whereas as from a dream having forgotten that there are other possibilities of life itself. I mean diversity is joyous. Diversity is whimsical. Diversity is to realize the other ways of being, other options. I mean people would say to me when I wrote that book The Wayfinders and did the CBC Massey lectures in 2009 and the editor put on a snappy subtitle: “Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world.” I answered that question ultimately in two words: climate change. Not to suggest that we go to a pre-industrial past, but rather to suggest the very existence of these other ways of being, these other ways of thinking, put the lie to those of us in our own culture who say that we cannot change as we all know we kind of must change the fundamental way that we interact with the planet.

AMT: Wade Davis, it's good to hear from you. Thank you.

WADE DAVIS: Thanks very much, Anna Maria.

AMT: Wade Davis, professor of anthropology at UBC. He was explorer-in-residence for National Geographic for 13 years. Some of the photos he took during that time are featured in his new book. It's called Wade Davis: Photographs. And you can see a few of them on our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. If you’re joining us partway through, go to our website or download the podcast to hear anything we talked about today. And that is our program for today. Stay with Radio One for the debut of the new q with host Tom Power. You won't only be hearing from a new host on q but a whole new sound, quite a lineup with the debut edition. Tom will chat with Adam Cohen who has just finished collaborating with his legendary dad, contributing to Leonard Cohen's latest album. It's the first time father and son have ever worked together on a musical project. We're going to leave you with a bit of q host Tom Power’s conversation with Adam Cohen. Be listening. He's waiting in the wings. He'll be with you momentarily. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

TOM POWER: You spent your whole life with this man. This is a man you've known since you were born. But as you mentioned, this was a rare opportunity to a) have great use but also to collaborate. And I'm curious, was there anything that surprised you about your father's creative process?

ADAM COHEN: You know you hear about this lugubrious man, this devotional man, this monastic training you know? This is a guy who you've heard takes seven, five, 12 years to write a song. Well, he really is that guy. He was working on lyrics while we were doing vocals. He would change lyrics—and these are songs that are sometimes 10, 12 years old. His devotion to exacting the highest expression of what he intended you know the devotion to his craft. It’s paranormal.

[Music: Ending theme]

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

October 24, 2016 full episode transcript

More Stories Like This