ABSTRACT
The dialectic of culture and communication, the way in which the dialectic of unit and relation is manifested in the practice of anthropology, is already present in TCS, though in a different formulation. Roy Wagner’s response to the predicament is that modes of symbolization are culturally determined: “the conventional separation entailed by a culture provides the essence of its semiotic orientation, or world view”. In The Invention of Culture (TIC), Wagner affirms that biases result both from the anthropologist’s ‘culture’ and from anthropology as a discipline. In the first chapters of TIC, the anthropologist’s cultural and scholarly background is crucial to the invention of another ‘culture,’ and it is in relation to his background that relations in the field are established—this moment corresponds to the “anthropology of coyote.” The continuity of “Barok culture” is said to depend on such images, which synthesize its power.
