Book Review: Tales of a Shamans Apprentice, by Mark Plotkin
Good book, good story. He tells in very abbreviated form how he stumbled into becoming a positive force for the preservation of native Amazonian peoples, culture, and particularly medicine.
No matter how many times I read such examples, I continue to be shocked by how quickly our way of life destroys every other way of life it comes in contact with. Sometimes one feels the previous culture fights against contemporary western values, as in Iran & Iraq. Mostly though peoples seem to willingly throw away their way of life in order to jump on to our way of life: allopathic medicine, cars, capitalism, TV, little distinction between roles of men & women, Tshirts & baseball caps, guns, etc. And in the case of Mark Plotkin's book, the Amazonian peoples immediately throwing away their knowledge that plants can actually be communicated with, and healing can actually take place by taking the patient into worlds that are right next to the world our senses show us. Healing of broken bones as well as injured souls. By "immediately throwing away" I mean in one generation. In a civilization or culture, if we take a human life to be the smallest living bit of that culture, then we can see time scales of ~20 years to be the smallest bit of time a culture can be resolved. Western culture comes to a village in the Amazon. Bam. Now there are no more children who want to study with the Shaman. The Shaman of that village is the last to know, and when he dies, the knowledge dies.
Mark Plotkin is making valiant efforts to preserve this old knowledge by uniting it with our capitalism and frantic search for single molecule miracle drugs. Let's hope he succeeds.
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