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Summary: A touching work, inspires one to become radically egalitaria
Review: A sad but insightful revelation of just how our culture has insidiously generated violence as a way of life. Stu Schlegel's good news is ... violence is not an inherent part of human nature ... witness the Teduray.
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Summary: Broadens your perspective
Review: I believe that it is always beneficial to step outside our own culture for a while, to see how others live and how we can learn from them.
Especially when the culture we are observing is one as beautiful as the Teduray. They, like so many indigenous people, lived their lives with the well-being of the community as their focus. This is in sharp contrast to the lonely and individualistic lives so many Americans live.
The people of the Teduray village in which Dr Schlegel lived were all massacred years ago. We find this out in the beginning of the book. It was heartbreaking for him, as he lets us know. Then, as you go on to read the book, learning about his two years with the Teduray, you get to know the people - their names, personalities, lifestyles - you come to care about them. I found that knowing they had all been killed led me to place greater importance on learning from them. The temporary nature of their lives gave permanence to the wisdom they imparted.
They lived beautifully, communally, with great compassion. I felt humbled, and grateful to have read their story and learned from them.
I highly recommend this book. It is lovely, heart-centered, and written by a clearly beautiful man.
And if you like this book, you probably will also like The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. I learned many of my better parenting skills from this book - another study of living within an indigenous community.
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Summary: This book changed my life!
Review: Prof. Schlegel's writing made me feel like I was there in the rainforest with him and the amazing people he lived with. The worldview he describes, and the moving way he tells the story, made me rethink my own life philosophy. I have become a kinder person because of this book.
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Summary: A challenge to those searching for wisdom.
Review: Schlegel has written a deeply moving account of his life and personal struggles in the quest for meaning and authenticity while living in a remote part of our world. His experience and reflection on them are true guides for anyone on a spiritual pilgrimage. He provides guide posts, warning signs and descriptions of how he was moved toward a deeper understanding of himself, his family, his work and his life. The Teduray people accepted him, cared for him and taught him - and he in turn accepted and loved them. From this exchange came experience that each of us can touch in our own quest for meaning in our lives.Wisdom from a Rainforest is a book you will want to read more than once. The stories, personal challenges faced and insights gathered are infectious - they bring the reader to a different level of perception and understanding of daily life. They can be stepping stones to a deeper and richer understanding of who you are. I highly recommend Wisdom from a Rainforest to anyone curious about how we could be improved with insights from outside our experience. The Teduray have much to teach us and Schlegel makes their wisdom accessible.
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Summary: Very useful guide to finding a path in our own culture.
Review: Schlegel has written a deeply moving account of his life and personal struggles in the quest for meaning and authenticity while living in a remote part of our world. His experience and reflection on them are true guides for anyone on a spiritual pilgrimage. He provides guide posts, warning signs and descriptions of how he was moved toward a deeper understanding of himself, his family, his work and his life. The Teduray people accepted him, cared for him and taught him - and he in turn accepted and loved them. From this exchange came experience that each of us can touch in our own quest for meaning in our lives. Wisdom from a Rainforest is a book you will want to read more than once. The stories, personal challenges faced and insights gathered are infectious - they bring the reader to a different level of perception and understanding of daily life. They can be stepping stones to a deeper and richer understanding of who you are. I highly recommend Wisdom from a Rainforest to anyone curious about how we could be improved with insights from outside our experience. The Teduray have much to teach us and Schlegel makes their wisdom accessible.
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Summary: A challenge to those searching for wisdom.
Review: Searching for wisdom today usually brings to mind countless books on how to get ahead, or rich, or thin, or powerful. Schlegel has not written a how-to book for modern success, but the story of his own discernment of the difference between wisdom and knowledge. Although Schlegel went to the Philipine island of Mendanao for an intellectual purpose, a study to complete his doctoral dissertation on the Teduray tribe, he found himself impressed with a style of life and social interaction that most westerners would call primitive. Schlegel saw not only the value and benefit of the Teduray lifestyle, he found his own life influenced by these people in positive ways. The tribe is now extiinct, wiped out as the result of political conflict, but the wisdom of its ways has not been lost, it lives on in Schlegel's depiction in this book, providing wisdom to those who search for it in unpredictable places.
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Summary: Pages filled with wisdom about Teduray society and our own.
Review: Stuart Schelgel takes us on an anthropologist's journey into the rainforest of the Island of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines to study the Teduray people. Wisdom from a Rainforest is not a journey back to an age of innocence. In his portrait of the Teduray people, the author shows us a society that has developed complex spiritual, social, economic and legal systems. These systems are skillfully used by the Teduray people to deal with the internal conflict inherent in any human society and to permit the Teduray to live in respectful harmony with their natural environment. Wisdom from a Rainforest is also a journey into one man's soul as the author strives to understand the nature of conflict and violence in his own culture. The reader will discover, as the author himself discovered that the epidemic of violence in our own culture is fueled by our own complex belief systems. In his juxtaposition of the Teduray way with our own, Dr. Schlegel shows us that assertion of the right of one person or group to dominate another breeds social inequality. The inherent competition ingrained in our social systems is supported by the myth of good and bad violence. To the Teduray people, the resolution of conflict through violence is "just no way to live." In western culture a hero is someone who wins a competitive economic, political or recreational contest through self assertion. In Teduray culture, domination of one person by another is seen "as nothing but a tool of ranking; its only use was to enforce some hierarchical pecking order," and that is also "no way to live." Wisdom from a Rain Forest is a very accessible book. The author's analysis of the egalitarian Teduray approach to living in their rain forest environment in peace and cooperation provides us with a model we could well use to heal our own social and environmental ills. Read this book and even if you are presently despondent about the seemingly insolvable problem of violence in our own culture, you will come away with hope.
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Summary: self help for the planet
Review: The people you will meet in this book are cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian, and truly democratic. They also live in harmony with the earth. There have been many books about tribal people, gathering- hunting societies, like the Bambuti of the Congo rain forest, the Kung Bushmen, the Inuit, Native Americans. Most of these people have values similar to those of the Forest Teduray. Gathering - hunting societies have to be cooperative because its the only way they can survive. There are no hierarchies for the same reason, and women are always at least equal to men because in most such economies they provide 70- 80% of the food Nevertheless the Forest Teduray are a special kind of people for a number of reasons. They are semi agricultural, and they live in villages rather than small bands, and these villages are connected to each other in a very loose, unstructured federation. And yet they have not only maintained the basic core values of traditional gatherer- hunting peoples, but have developed and refined them into a way of life that not only works perfectly for them, but actually seems possible for our own society. It is a bit of a stretch, I admit, and the historical record is hardly encouraging. It does appear that nation states must always develop male dominated hierarchical and violent, aggressive societies. But there is no compelling reason to believe that this is necessary. The Teduray think it is "no way to live". Just imagine living in a Teduray world: a global human society living in harmony with everyone else, and with the planet. As difficult as it will surely be to get there, it's got to be worth trying. I never saw a better manual for how to live this way than Wisdom from a Rain Forest. The Teduray really know how to live, and they know how to talk about it. I think the world needs this book, and I wish everyone would read it. There are always many books on the best seller lists about how to fix your own personal inner life, to provide soup for your soul or something. But maybe we can't do any of that by ourselves. Maybe we need to work together to build a healthy society. A way to live the Teduray would call "just right". Many times you may hear people say "this book changed my life". I have always believed this is not really possible, that no book can ever really do that. This book changed my life.
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Summary: A fascinating study of a noncompetitive society.
Review: This book had a unique vantage point, in that it is an account of a forest society written by an Episcopal priest who became a social anthropologist after a stint of missionary work in the Phillipines. The exploration of the rainforest society, the Teduray, raises important questions about the fundamental principals of how WE live. The Teduray are a nonviolent society, and to learn how different their underlying guidning principles are from our own is both interesting and humbling. Mr. Schlegel writes a personal witness to this people, who were subsequently slaughtered in a land war after his period of study. He writes both as a scientist and as a man of the spirit, and shares a truly beautiful story in the process.
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Summary: good choice for anthropology students
Review: This is a very good, readable book. It depicts a culture in which helping others was the normal--not the charitable--thing to do. The mindset of the Teduray people of the Philippine rainforest, with whom the author Stuart Schlegel lived for years, is a world view that, sadly, seems almost unbelievable for people who are indoctrinated into a capitalistic system. It's like a splash of cold water in the face. Wouldn't it be nice for every Anthropology 101 student in the U.S. to experience this book, if for no other reason at all simply to face the fact that there are human mindsets possible that are not ruled by money, greed, scarcity, and conspicuous consumption?
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