Wade Davis: an Inuit elder and his shit knife

I just watched this 2003 TED Talk video lecture by Wade Davis, the pioneering ethnobotanist and anthropologist who has lived with an amazing array of indigenous cultures around the world. Of course, Davis is best known for his studies of ritual use of psychedelics and also the zombification practices among Vodoun acolytes in Haiti. I've found Davis's work to be personally inspirational, provocative, and mind-expanding. This TED Talk, titled "Cultures At The Far Edge of the World" is no exception. In it, he tells an amazing story about an wonderfully resourceful Inuit elder. Davis retold the same story in a recent Discover magazine interview, but I highly recommend the TED video too because it features many his breathtaking photographs. From Discover:

One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?

Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.

TED Talk: Wade Davis, Cultures At the Far Edge of the World (ted.com), From Hatian Zombie Poison to Inuit Knives Made of Feces (Discover), Buy Davis's "Light at the Edge of the World" book (Amazon)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

MORE: Book

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

OM

…Well, since nobody else has said it, I guess I will:

“It’s obvious this Eskimo has his shit together.”
minTphresh

sigh. what, no rusty trombone?
Wigwam Jones

sigh. what, no rusty trombone?

Hard to perform on oneself, I hear.
Glossolalia Black

#14, I think “Turd Chisel” has become my favorite new Bad Band Name.
Tensegrity

#14 got me thinking

shitknife
turd chisel
crapcutter
pooptool
chocoshiv
dirtdirk
hershey hacker
fecaleatherman
Tensegrity

One more and then I’ll stop:

butt katana
santellana

i’m going to hell for this: surprise buttskates!
Anonymous

With the extreme colds of the location I would imagine feces would get frozen solid.It’s several degrees below in the arctic *more so than your freezer. Possible? yes, likely? yes, I would imagine they found a dog carcass (or what was left), feces, and the dog missing. If they took away his materials its easy to piece it together.

Or he came back and told his story.
mgfarrelly

For work, I recently met with an archeologist to go over some Paleo-Indian (the earliest people in North America) tools and implements. He showed me this celt, a heavy hand axe. He also had a shaping stone that was used to make grooves for axes and other stone tools. These tools would be lashed to wooden poles with dried animal tendons and used to hunt mega-fauna, like mammoth and mastadon.

You see what people who have time, hunger and a desire to live will invent and it just staggers you. Gives me hope really. For all the DOOM talk, I think humans will make it. We’re tough sons of guns.
farmfoodie

*applauds Robert #10* Nicely done.

I can’t believe how fast Davis talks. He sounds absolutely breathless, and yet he’s incredibly articulate. Was he deliberately cramming in every word he could? Was this a case of nerves that made him overclock? Does he give this exact speech so often that it bores him so that he’s desperate to get through it quickly? Or does his mouth just always run at that speed? I could barely keep up with his ideas in real time.
Anonymous

Kyle Armbruster,

The measure of a culture is the happiness of its people and the health of its landbase, not whether it survived an account with a culture that was more effectively able to use its technology to violent ends. Competition is not the point here, nor is it the measure of all things. If industrial capitalism succeeds in turning the entire biosphere into beer cans and Furbies, will that be a success? Instead of competition, let’s look for other measures of the value of a culture.
Takuan

do read his books
Wigwam Jones

If he disappeared, how do they know about the knife, or the dog? Did he leave a shit note or pictograph? I mean, I’m just curious. Like I really give a shit.
Kyle Armbruster

Cultures die out because they can’t compete. There is no inherent value to any culture, only whether it succeeds.

Culture is technology. There is no more reason to preserve dying cultures than there is to force people to use butter churns. Butter churns and dead cultures belong in museums. Those who seek to preserve them are paternalistic fools.
Joel Johnson

YES. Can I change my working name to Shitknife?

(Also, I can’t hear that term without thinking of Trailer Park Boys. “A god damned shitknife, Randy!”)
bwcbwc

This is why global warming is such a disaster. All your shitknives are just fertilizer now.
Maddy

Finally, a successor to the life-gives-you-lemonade metaphor …
deckard68

I heard he strung together a bunch of sea turtles with the hair from his back.
Red Leatherman

Of course you realise what this means if the TSA sees this
IWood

Government enemas?

Oh, wait…
David Pescovitz

FORGEWELD @33, Absolutely. I found this talk to be profoundly moving.
samuraizenu

hr bld gt bnt n Srh Pln’s sn’s hcky skts nd sh fshnd sht blds fr hm n mnnr smlr t th ld nt. H thn wnt n t wn th gm fr hs tm nd ws lctd cptn f th tm. Hs tm wnt n t wn th chmpnshp tht yr. Ths md Srh s pplr sh ws lctd myr f th smll twn, bt nt ntl sh hd hrslf blssd n chrch gnst th wtchcrft f th ld nts wh wr ngry bcs sh stl thr tchnlgy.

Sh thn wnt n t bcm Hr Ryl Hghnss f lsk nd Prnc McCn cm lng nd swpt hr ff hr ft nd tk hr t th mythcl sl f Wshngtn DC whr thy bcm th Mvrcks f Rpblc nd lvd hpply vr ftr.
Mr_Voodoo

Similar thing happened to me. I broke my one and only kitchen knife about 30 min. before a dinner party! So, using the freezer, I fashioned my own shitknife. But the saliva sharpening wasn’t working too well (I was using my tongue, not saliva on my finger, probably where I went wrong.) So I borrowed a neighbor’s butcher knife to sharpen my shitknife. Worked like a charm. I must be part Inuit!
OM

…I didn’t know MacGuiver was an Eskimo?
Flying Orca

@4: Not much hair on an Inuk’s back. Trust me.

@8: You’d have to see it to believe it. Unbelievable mechanical genius. There’s a lot of selection pressure in the Arctic.

@14: Freuchen is a bit over the top, I’m not sure I’d trust him as a source.
codesuidae

MarkM@16

how can a knife of ice (let’s call it ice, ok?) cut the still warm body of the dog and retain its integrity? i just dont believe it.

In the depths of an Alaska winter you can carry liquid propane in an open bucket.

Weird shit happens in the extreme cold.

I’m not entirely sure at what temperature shit goes mushy, but a shitknife at, say, -100F has to come up at least 100 degrees before it reaches household deep freeze temperature.

This is definitely something the MythBusters need to investigate.
jjasper

Someone’s certainly full of shit.
redteam

So you can polish a turd – and sharpen it, too.
TheFool

Kyle Armbuster: Maybe, but still every culture that dies is a loss of knowledge and wisdom for humanity at large (i.e. the rest of us). You can’t bottle up a culture for future use after all its members are dead or assimilated. Cooperation as a species *is* a “competitive” advantage for our long-term survival.
samuraizenu

Finally got censored, I’ve done my civic duty…..YAY!
Anonymous

His Massey Lectures podcasts are on iTunes (CBC). Excellent bedtime forage for the mind.
Robert

“Oh, crap,” he thought as he read John’s note. He was being sewered for his entire stock of eau-de-toilet. For the turd time. What cheek! So he grabbed his shitknife from the wooden bowel next to him, donned his cloaca, and evacuated his log cabin, heading for the dump in the moonlight. What else could he do? Do?

Oh man, I can’t go on!
DrJen

Sure, sure…myth, legend, awesome true anecdote, generator of puns, whatever. A small part of an otherwise interesting video. Nevertheless, I’m of the mind that learning about the TED talks is the BEST thing (of many very good things) that I’ve gotten from Boing Boing. Plus, if I am ever stranded in the freezing weather of the midwest…well…
mitechka

“Davis is best known for his studies of ritual use of psychedelics”

I think this might explain a lot about the “shitknife” story ;)
Wigwam Jones

I like apple presses, and I make my own bread from grain that a guy grows organically and mills with a stone burr mill. Dead culture, I guess. But dead culture tastes SO GOOD!

I would never force a person to use a butter churn. Perhaps a bellows fan, to keep me cool on a hot day. Hop to it, @40 Kyle!
Richard Wymarc

I smell a MythBusters episode in the near future…
angryhippo

#3- I will be sure to have a camera on me to record the face of the first person who hears me say “when life give you lemons, crap into your hand, make a shitknife and go kill a dog.”
cuvtixo

Butt Katana? Is that for committing a Septic Seppuku? Also, the feces in the story is distracting- the main issue would involve frozen saliva keeping a sharp edge! Considering the things they do at the icehotel.com in Sweden and the Montreal Ice Hotel, I think its not too unlikely. Dog skin is not very tough either. Don’t ask me how I know that. Now, improvising a sled with freshly butchered ribcage, even a sled dog ribcage… I find that far-fetched!
- Anonymous
  
  Sleds are generally small, all you really need is something big enough for your buttocks to fit in. Butchering a dog could have been made easy if he cracked its neck and then went to work on skinning the body. I doubt he stabbed the dog to death.
David Pescovitz

DRJEN @37, I agree! The TED Talks are fantastic, right!? It’s really so great that they made them freely available online.
Linds

I couldn’t listen to him. He sounds like a minister or something preaching. Except he’s not in a church
MrMonkey

To all the skeptics, all I can say is that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. And even if it’s not (true, that is) I think I’ll believe it anyway. Even without the benefit of scatalogical puns, I’d still want to live in a world where shit knives are possible.
drkptt

The ‘shitknife’ (more of a ‘turd chisel’) has been documented in earlier literature. In the book North to the Night, author Alvah Simon describes how he sailed his boat to a bay between Canada and Greenland and allowed it to be frozen-in for the winter. He brought along books of arctic exploration to pass the time and wrote about a story by Danish explorer Peter Freuchen, who traversed Greenland by foot in the ’20s. Simon described how Freuchen made a snow cave to protect himself during a blizzard. When he tried to leave he found the snow too frozen to dig out, so he constructed an excrement implement to escape.

This fascinated me enough to find Freuchen’s original tale. I think it’s in Adventures in the Arctic. I was disappointed to find that Freuchen only considered the idea, he didn’t actually do it. I believe this same incident resulted in the frostbite that required amputation of his foot (as I remember). This bio describes loss of his leg in 1926:
http://www.litweb.net/biography/414/Peter_Freuchen.html
plasmator

You know, I’ve never seen someone link a TED talk that I didn’t enjoy. I’ve watched a ton of them at this point, and it’s shocking to me how many of them can be good.

I would have thought that I’d have seen a mediocre one by now, having watched literally weeks worth of hours of them.
drkptt

@28: Freuchen is certainly over the top, but his description of the chisel predates the story of the 1950s Arctic Bay incident. I found the reference; in Arctic Adventure Peter Freuchen writes: “…One thought that came to me was to try to move my bowels and form a chisel of the excrement, which would immediately freeze, to dig the hard snow…” The copyright is 1935. Did he write in English? There’s no mention of translation from an earlier Danish book.

A couple of pages later he seeks treatment from an Inuit nurse for his gangrenous foot. She killed some lemmings and laid the warm skins, bloody side down, on his wounds. After a few hours she peeled them off with his dead flesh stuck to them. He then decided his toes needed to come off. She offers to bite them off at the joints so that her mouth would seal the wounds to prevent ghosts from occupying his body. He declines and whacks them off with a nail puller and hammer instead.

Just a little over the top…
Wigwam Jones

@ #36 codesuidae

In the depths of an Alaska winter you can carry liquid propane in an open bucket.

If I understand the information I just googled on it, that’s -45 degrees F.

Weird shit happens in the extreme cold.

I suppose that’s true. But although -45 degrees F is quite possible in Alaska, it does not seem to be an everyday occurrence, but more on the order of an unusual event.

Not that Alaska doesn’t get cold – it sure does. But it’s not like Antarctica.
Allegra

I saw Wade mention this anecdote in a talk he gave in Vancouver about 8 years ago. Whether it’s true or not, it’s certainly a testament to the ingenuity of humankind.

That was also the talk where I first heard him say, “Ayahuasca is a lot of things, but fun isn’t one of them,” when commenting on how norteamericanos are going on trips to go ‘tripping’.

All you punsters, please consider yourselves given a virtual Gibbs-style love-tap on the back of the head….
MarkM

how can a knife of ice (let’s call it ice, ok?) cut the still warm body of the dog and retain its integrity? i just dont believe it.

if we have to get into it, ice will harden into a better form than shit rit? ice will have a uniform solidity, whereas shit will be less uniform, have air pockets, gross matter, making it have less integrity.

anyone else skeptical? definitely a mythbusters episode– but test with ice, please, oh please.
Antinous

Cuvtixo,

Seppuku is disembowelment. There’s shit involved anyway.
doug117

We’re all skeptical but it’s a *great* story.
Mojave

Told you he was HardCore!!

Dayum!!
Sleepy13

How unlike our culture to focus on irrelavant minutia.

There is more to the talk than ones own projections about poo blades, would it/wouldnt it nonsense.
Thanks for the video.
airship

After reading this, it strikes me that the Batman is a total pansy.
Tenn

donned his cloaca

You, sir, win one internets. I don’t see why someone hasn’t informed you of this yet.
forgeweld

Once you get over the giddiness of the shitknife, it really is worth your time to listen to Davis’ profound and urgent message about vanishing ways of being human.
minTphresh

read a story of a dogsledder caught in a blizzard. made himself a shelter under his sled which had iced in by morning, making escape near impossible. he made himself a lil shitchisel, and chipped his way out of the ice and into iditarod legend. BTW the trailer park boys referenced @#2 priceless.
Wigwam Jones

Guy was into Cleveland Steamers. Then he gave himself a Filthy Sanchez and fled into the woods, screaming.
Anonymous

To the person wondering how they knew of the Shitknife and the dog if he “disappeared into the night”, read it again… That all took place before he supposedly took off.