Wade Davis

Wade Davis

Wade Davis is an ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, he 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 more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections.

Wade Davis ‘s  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 best seller that appeared in ten languages and was later released by Universal as a motion picture. His other books include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990), Shadows in the Sun (1993), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), The Clouded Leopard (1998), Rainforest (1998), Light at the Edge of the World (2001), The Lost Amazon (2004), Grand Canyon (2008), Book of Peoples of the World (ed. 2008), and One River (1996), which was nominated for the 1997 Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Fire on the Mountain, a history of the early British efforts on Everest, will be published in 2009. Sheets of Distant Rain will follow. Davis is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2002 Lowell Thomas Medal (The Explorers Club) and the 2002 Lannan Foundation prize for literary nonfiction. In 2004 he was made an honorary member of the Explorers Club, one of just 20 in the hundred-year history of the club.

Wade Davis appears in

  • iran.women .pixabay

    This broadcast is a favorite legacy show that we produced under our old name Travel'n On and before rebranding as WORLD FOOTPRINTS. National Geographic author Jon Bowermaster talks about his journey down the coast of Vietnam. Then- Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis joins Tonya and Ian to talk about his recent travels to Peru, Borneo, Tibet and northern Kenya. Finally, learn about the Shams Ensemble, one of the first groups to pursue musical independence and freedom of women's voices in Iran, and their current US tour. The Shams Ensemble is a musical ensemble that uses the Tanbur, Daf (frame drum), Ney, and several other percussion instruments to play Sufi, Kurdish folk, and Persian traditional music. In 1977 Keikhosro Pournazeri worked to form the Shams Ensemble in Kermnshh, Iran. He invited a few of his students who were familiar with playing Tenbur, and over time, as they learned the instrument and gained [...]