Source: Calgary Herald
Author Glenn Dixon hopes his book, Pilgrim in the Palace of Words, offers a glimpse into the inner workings of cultures around the world.- Spotlight: Glenn Dixon will hold a mixed-media event at the Engineered Air Theatre on Saturday, Jan. 30, at 7:30 p.m.
Three years ago, Glenn Dixon spent five days at what must have seemed like the end of the earth.
In the Amazon rainforest, he lived among the Achuar, a tribe that was apparently unaware of the outside world, and vice versa, until they were “discovered” in the mid-1970s. Dixon, a travel writer and language consultant with the Calgary Board of Education, was there as part of the research for what would eventually become his newly released debut, Pilgrim in the Palace of Words: A Journey Through the 6,000 Languages of Earth (Dundurn Press, 351 Pages, $24.99). The Achuar, he reckoned, were a good case study in how language evolves without outside influence.
Dixon describes his journey to find them as a somewhat harrowing trip that begins in the capital of Ecuador and continues inside increasingly smaller planes that plunge deeper into the wilderness.
Once there, he discovers the Achuar are anything but quaint tree huggers. One of those rare groups to have been spared the influence of the western world, they apparently remain fierce, blow dart-wielding warriors with a long history of family vendettas and warfare. Meanwhile, the relatively untouched language and rules of social interaction are governed by ritual and a strict code of conduct.
Dixon is told that making eye contact with the men is a bad idea. Making eye contact with the women might be even worse.
And if they offer some of their beloved Nijiamanch, a cloudy substance fermented by human saliva and charitably referred to as “beer,” he should attempt to appear gracious.
“I was told, ‘you don’t really have to drink this stuff, but at least be welcoming of it,’ ” Dixon says, sipping a coffee at the Calgary Herald cafeteria. “I didn’t try it. But it was all very ritualized.”
While Dixon’s sense of adventure might stop short of sampling saliva-beer, it appears to be otherwise all-encompassing.
He is interested in linguistics, having written his master’s thesis on the rarefied topic of linguistic relativity. But it doesn’t take long into a conversation with the amiable Calgarian to realize that his real interest is in globe-trotting adventure.
“I know that Chapters has put it under language and dictionaries,” says Dixon. “There is a whole section there on linguistics. But I thought, no, I’d rather it be under literary, adventure travel.”
Pilgrim in the Palace of Words is certainly defined more by Dixon’s first-person experiences, chance encounters and dialogue with strangers than academic theories.
As of this summer, the 50-something former teacher has visited 60 countries around the world. Four years ago he decided to mix his love of travel with his more scholarly pursuits. But for the most part, his debut is an episodic adventure tale chronicling how his travels influence his study of words. It took him from the troubled holy lands of Israel, to Cambodia’s temples of Angkor, to remote Tibetan palaces and into Turkey, Peru, Greece and countless other spots.
The idea, Dixon said, was to show how the world’s 6,000 languages are fragile and ever-evolving, how they’ve helped shape history while offering a glimpse into the inner workings of cultures around the world.
“I hope people get the bigger picture, not necessarily just the language,” Dixon says. “I myself am not a great language learner. It’s more about just talking with these people and learning about their culture.”
And while his trip to visit the Achuar was certainly well-planned, many of the other moments of enlightenment seem to occur almost by chance. Travelling on a crowded bus while crossing into Turkey, for instance, Dixon comes across a hulking Nigerian who spends the long journey discussing the 200 languages of his home country.
Dixon takes the wrong bus during a planned trip to Athens, and accidentally ends up at the ruins of Delphi, where Greek mythology teaches the “human world meets the divine.” But among the people he meets there are a pair of tourists from Quebec of all places, who are able to offer their own lessons in language.
“I would say almost all of it was happy accidents,” Dixon says. “It’s always in the back of my mind to be asking questions about their language and get them going about that. And everybody is happy to talk about their language and culture. And sometimes that’s not just the people that live there but the other travellers that I’m on the road with. They’re endlessly fascinating people.”
The former Winston Churchill High School student said it was his early years teaching English as a second language in Calgary schools that led to an interest in other cultures. And if he was able to determine any universal truths about humans regardless of their language, it was that we are generally welcoming of outsiders.
In the book, Dixon is attacked by wild dogs while in Spain. A shark comes dangerously close to him while he’s swimming in Belize. Humans, on the other hand, seem relatively benign.
“Everywhere I’ve gone, people have been welcoming,” says Dixon. “In all my travels — 60 countries now — I’ve never had trouble with a human being. Maybe I’m just lucky.”