In Conversation with Wade Davis - Part I
Channel: Channel AID
Date: 22/11/2020

Edmund Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.”

Wade is a Canadian–U.S.–Colombian cultural anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, photographer, and filmmaker, whose work has focused on worldwide indigenous cultures, especially in North America and South America, particularly involving the traditional uses and beliefs associated with psychoactive plants. Davis came to prominence with his 1985 best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow about the zombies of Haiti. Davis is a professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. He currently serves on the board of the Amazon Conservation Association, and as a member of the TED Braintrust.

An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international bestseller later released by Universal as a motion picture. His books have been translated into sixteen languages, including French, Italian, German, Norwegian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, Basque, Macedonian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Korean, Bulgarian, Japanese, and Malay, and have sold approximately 900,000 copies worldwide.