Culture Confronts Nature in the Dialectical World of the Tropics

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, whereby perceived order in the environment is the basis for systems of classifications, 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