Mark Plotkin

speaker

534 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Mark Plotkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

They got to grandma and ask, why is this, these falls got such and such a name?

So instead of them just looking at dirty pictures, they are recording their culture as they go from preliterate to literate.

And that's been quite successful.

A colleague of mine says you're creating cyber shamans.

Okay.

But the side to that that's very positive is I started a program decades ago called The Shaman's Apprentice.

I realized that I could not write down all the stuff the shamans were teaching me, even if they taught me everything, which they wouldn't.

But they would teach their sons and grandsons and daughters and granddaughters.

So I actually gave little scholarships to

To the kids and to the shamans to make this transition happen.

Well, lo and behold, after a couple of years, the young guys know these plants.

And when they go to town, they've got plants to sell.

They've got medicine to sell.

They know how to do Olympia as a cleaning, a training, a treatment.

And so ethnobotany is giving them jobs and putting money in their pocket, which means they'll have to go to the Goldfields.

But the flip side of that is one of the great shamans of the Colombian Amazon complained one time to me about a decade ago.

He says, you know, cell phones are here and they're here to stay.

But here you need a SIM card to use a cell phone.

And we don't have a cash economy.

We're subsistence guys.

Showing 421–440 of 534 · page 22 of 27