ABSTRACT
Anthropologist Gary Urton argues on the basis of ethnographic evidence for an ancient lunar zodiac among the Quechua-speaking peoples of the Peruvian Andes in South America. The mythic imagination aligns the sky-earth and life-death oppositions with a rich assortment of conceptual contrasts that in the extensive culture region of the central African savannah includes the idea that the seasonal occurrence of the great bushfires toward the end of the six-month period of drought itself precipitates the first rains. Lévi-Strauss succeeds by dint of exhaustive analysis in establishing his case that ‘primitive’ or mythopaeic thought exhibits a uniformly patterned matrix consisting of a combination of binary contrasts and analogical relations. Many myths in Levi-Strauss’s grand collection appear to be implicitly concerned with the conditions of fruitful human dialogue, which requires distance, difference, and asymmetry between the parties in dialogue, together with the fact of necessary relationship.
