Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World is a video by Harvard anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis.
This refers to a series of 10 VHS videos of 60 minutes each. A co-production of Biniman Productions Limited, Adrian Malone Productions Limited ; KCET, Los Angeles and BBC-TV in association with The Global Television Network and with the participation of Rogers Telefund and Telefilm Canada. The editors were Michael Todd and Michael Fuller and the music was composed by Hans Zimmer.
The series was designed to stimulate reflection and inspire a new look at what the modern world can learn from tribal societies as we approach the millennium. Explores the values and different world perspectives that hold many tribal societies together. Presents tribal peoples in the dignity of their own homes and captures their customs and ceremonies with extraordinary photography.
- pt. 1 The shock of the other
- pt. 2 Strange relations
- pt. 3 Mistaken identity
- pt. 4 An ecology of mind
- pt. 5 The art of living
- pt. 6 Touching the timeless
- pt. 7 A poor man shames us all
- pt. 8 Inventing reality
- pt. 9 The tightrope of power
- pt. 10 At the threshold.
There is also a book companion to the videos. It features 11 of the peoples discussed in the video. In it, he argues that the ancient customary wisdom, communal sharing and closeness to nature found in tribal or indigenous societies hold important survival lessons for our modern industrial society steeped in waste, consumerism, ecocide and social rootlessness.
Famous quotes containing the words modern world, tribal, wisdom, modern and/or world:
“I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.”
—Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944)
“Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“Certainly for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion—the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt—both with the common motion and with their own.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)