Tracking number: 1169GE-1173GE

Programs Included in the Series:

The Art of Living / Touching the Timeless
The Art of Living: Travel to the Wodaabe tribe of Niger and the Dogon peoples of Mali to witness the ways they celebrate life and death with acts of beauty and grace. Meet an HIV positive Canadian artist who shows viewers his way of connecting his art to the meaning of life and death. Touching the Timeless: Accompany the Huichol people of Mexico on their annual pilgrimage to collect peyote, the sacred food of the gods, and visit the house of a Navajo medicine man who invites the spirits into his world through sand painting, chanting, and ‘walking in beauty’.

Mistaken Identity / An Ecology of Mind
Mistaken Identity: Explore the question of who you are and where your individual identity begins and ends through scenes taken from the family life of an abortion counselor in Toronto, a boy’s initiation in the Brazilian Xavante tribe, a high school girl’s attempted suicide, and an Indonesian Sumbanese tribesman’s relationship to his dead relatives. An Ecology of Mind: Learn how the Makuna of Columbia pass their sophisticated ecological awareness from generation to generation through complex myths and rituals. Understand how tribal peoples views’ contrast with the evolutionary ideas handed down to the modern world from the Bible and from 19th century Darwinian theory.

The Shock of the Other / Strange Relations
the Shock of the Other: Through scenes of the decimation of the rainforest and interviews with indigenous people, discover why so much is at stake when modern industrialism meets the tribal world. Strange Relations: Intimate scenes of Western societies and marriages in the tribal societies of Nepal and the plains of Niger, show how individuals can discover a balance between personal desire and social needs in the context of a loving and nurturing family.
A Poor Man Shames Us All / Inventing Reality
A Poor Man Shames Us All: Explore the alternative views of wealth and society that are exhibited in lives of tribal cultures. Trace the development of free market economics and explores how its characteristics contrast with tribal conceptions of wealth. Inventing Reality: Through tribal villages in Mexico and a cancer centre in Toronto, understand how the certainties of science can combine with natural conceptions of physical disease both in the tribal world of the shaman and in modern medical science.
 
The Tightrope of Power / At the Threshold
The Tightrope of Power: Viewers contrast Western form of states to the practice of democracy through consensus. Witness the struggles of the Ojibwa, Cree and Mohawk tribes against the Canadian federal government. Understand how their visions can help us refine our definitions of democracy, pluralism and the state. At the Threshold: Travel to central France to explore the most perplexing dilemmas of the Western World – heart versus mind, body versus soul, the desires of the individual versus the needs of society. Through intimate views of family life in tribal and Western societies, understand why our survival as a species may now depend on the wisdom of our tribal past.