7:30pm, Uris Auditorium, Cornell
University
Also screening Tuesday at Ithaca College
with Producer Abigail Wright
In 1941, Dr. Richard Evans Schultes walked into the Amazon rainforest and founded the science of ethnobotany under the tutelage of the jungle’s master healers. Immersed in a culture of mystical transformations, ancient rituals and psychotropic drugs, Schultes spent 14 years among a vanishing people as one of their own and learned secrets of healing unexplainable by Western science. Mark Plotkin follows in Schultes’ footsteps today as he seeks the knowledge to cure diseases that baffle Western medicine. Like Schultes before him, Plotkin learns from Amazon shamans, the doctors, philosophers, and keepers of the legends of cultures too often dismissed by the modern world as primitive. His work with these geniuses of the forest highlights the dire costs to the human race of rampant deforestation that claims a forest the size of Florida every year. But the West’s seductive lure is decimating these cultures even faster than its bulldozers take the forest, making the shaman the rainforest’s most endangered species. The Shaman’s Apprentice chronicles Plotkin’s race against time to preserve and protect the vanishing tradition of shamanistic knowledge. Directed by Miranda Smith. Produced by Abigail Wright. 2001, USA, 54 min.
Cosponsored by the Pentangle Program, and the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy. Sponsored in part by a grant from the Cornell Council for the Arts.
