Ethnocide vs. Genocide

“humanity’s greatest legacy is the “ethnosphere,” the cultural counterpart to the biosphere, and “the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.” ~ ted.com

Some parts of the video :

• Voodoo – one of the greatest religions in the world simply because the continent of Africa is so commonly forgotten.
• All cultures in all times, have engaged in the impossibilities of life.
• It’s power, not change or technology, that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. Power, the crude face of domination. And whenever you look around the world, you’ll discover these aren’t cultures destined to fade away. These are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to.
• Genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned but Ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s way of life, is not only not condemned, it is universally, in many quarters, celebrated, as part of the development strategy.
• The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear, but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold.
• And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice. Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity?
• Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities.
• When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices. And it’s within that song that we will all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples and all gardens find a way to flourish. And there are great moments of optimism.
• It is pretty obvious, at least to those of us who have travelled to these remote reaches of the planet, to realise that they are not remote at all. They are homelands of somebody. They represent branches of a human imagination, right from the dawn of time. And for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the naked Geography of hope.
• “we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything…we think that polemics are not persuasive, but we think that storytelling can change the world, and so we are probably the best storytelling institution in the world.”
• “… the central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural pluralistic world where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being.”

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