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Culture Confronts Nature in the Dialectical World of the Tropics

AVENI AND URTON are to be congratulated for organizing a conference 1 V that, for the first time, has brought together scholars from various disciplines to discuss the ethnoastronomy and archaeoastronomy of the American tropics. We have had to converse across disciplinary boundaries and I hope that the endeavor has clarified some of the concepts, methods, and perspectives of the different specialities represented. As an anthropologist, I would like to suggest that the tropics provide a perceptual environment that promotes and enhances a particular 'science of the concrete,'1 whereby perceived order in the environment is the basis for systems of classificatio ns, epistemological structures, and cosmologies. In the American tropics, the science of the concrete takes on a particular character that results in epistemologies founded in what I will call dialectical, reversible dualism. The native philosophers of the indigenous societies under discussion engage in the study of the nature and limits of knowledge. Their epistemological reflections are embedded in religious and ritual practices. Moreover, the native philosophers, who are usually shamans or astronomer-priests, use methods and metaphorical language that are unfamiliar to us. More importantly, the logic that underlies these systems of knowledge is dialectical rather than rationalistic. As Roy Wagner has pointed out in The Invention of Culture, the anthropological definition of the concept of dialectic refers to a tension or dialogue-like alternation between two conceptions or viewpoints that are simultaneously contradictory and supportive of each other.