After several recent special issues, conceived and prepared successively by R. H. Robbins and E. M. Uhlenbeck (no. 153, ‘The Cultural Heritage: Languages in Peril”), Y. M. Coppens (no. 155, “From the Heavens to the Mind”), M. Matarasso (no. 158, “Shamans and Shamanism: On the Threshold of a New Millennium”), Diogenes turned to Julio Labastida, coordinator of the study of the social sciences at the National University of Mexico and contributing editor to Diogenes (he is in charge of the Spanish edition), and asked him to gather together for the current issue a certain number of articles devoted to themes related to the five-hundredth anniversary of America's “discovery” and its entry into a unified world.

Forty years ago, Roger Caillois approached the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Sciences and proposed that the Council establish a most unusual journal. At the request of UNESCO, the council had brought together a number of learned organizations in the realm of the humanities; Jacques Rueff had just assumed the presidency. In Caillois's mind, the objective was to put an end to the isolation enjoyed by most disciplines, which jealously guarded their prestige and authority and cared little to have their neighbors meddle in their affairs. For Caillois, the musicologist needed the classicist, the prehistorian the philosopher and, of course, the religious historian the linguist and the economist. The interdisciplinarian, at that time, attracted a fair amount of attention. But Caillois was not satisfied. Too often, it seemed to him, the interdisciplinarian was content with arbitrary and superficial juxtapositions. Caillois wanted to raise the transdisciplinary to the level of a methodology, and he wanted to try to draw together the different scholarly sectors reluctant to step beyond historical boundaries all too often frozen by time. Haunted by the theme of the chess board at least as much as by the medusa or by fulgora lantern flies, he coined a term of his own for all this, a term destined to a brilliant future: the lateral sciences.

On our planet only the American continent has had the privilege, or the unhappiness perhaps, of being subjected to a sort of accounting of “anniversaries” or, let us say, “centennials.” But this does not mean, for all that, that these anniversaries serve to commemorate its birth. Geologists tell us the continents were formed hundreds of millions of years ago, making the commemoration of the American continent relatively recent. Moreover, the origins of this custom are foreign to it and are imbued, it must be said, with perspectives that are by all evidence “Eurocentric.” Curiously, no one took any notice of the first or the second centennial of the American continent.

Between 1648 and 1652, Cyrano de Bergerac wrote a small satirical work entitled The Other World, a fictional account of his imaginary epic voyage to the Moon.* The story not only describes “The States and Empires of the Moon,” (its subtitle in the original edition), it provides a critical view of his own civilization as well. The narrator's position in his depiction of the radically different, “other” entity allows him to maintain opinions which, however whimsical, still include elements of social and philosophical examination. In the early stages of world migration, Europe was beginning to see the Other as a place for the expression, if not the transposition, of its ancient dreams; Cyrano, however, takes a different approach. He looks at ways the Other might be used to gain perspective on the Self. Looking down at Earth from above, he proclaims: “People, I declare that this moon is not a moon, but a world, and that world over there is not a world, but a moon.”

We are approaching two dates in our personal and collective calendars that oblige us to pause and reflect on our place in time and on our task in history.

We share the first date with all of humanity. We are coming closer to a new century and a new millenium, leaving behind the epoch of grandeur and servitude that we call “the twentieth century,” even though we live our time, like all times, accompanied by its multiple pasts.

Christopher Columbus did not know, on October 12, 1492, that he had reached a new world. Rather he believed, along with his crew, that he had crossed the ocean separating western Europe from east Asia; or, at the very least, that they were nearing the rich lands described by Marco Polo, which the Genoan had read about and his crew knew of, at least by reputation. In short, Columbus's ideas about the land he had just reached were considerably more inexact than those that Fernão d'Ulmo - that is to say, the Flemish explorer Ferdinand Van Olmen, Commander-Grantee in the service of João II, who presided at Terceira des Açores - had flaunted before the King. Indeed d'Ulmo was to play a more important role in the history of Portuguese discoveries than did Prince Henry the Navigator himself. In 1487, the year in which the great Portuguese sovereign was deciding between three possible routes to the Indies, d'Ulmo (as he is named in a royal diploma, dated July 24, 1486), or de Olmos as he is called in Las Casas's Historia de Indias, had proposed to the King that he “dar achada huûa grande ylha ou ylhas o terra firme per costa que se presume ser a ylha das Sete Cidades.” His proposal was thus to undertake a voyage to the Antilles, where the cartographers of that time placed the Isle of the Seven Cities, and where d'Ulmo conjectured that a neighboring continent (terra firme) might be located. Columbus himself returned from his voyage five years later. In the meantime, d'Ulmo had perished, perhaps having reached this continent whose existence he - but not Columbus - had foreseen. As to the history of the discovery of America: even if we don't know whether d'Ulmo reached it, we do know that Columbus was unaware that he himself had.

It was precisely when printing became popular in Europe - which, for the first time in history, permitted the conservation and mass diffusion of ancient Greek, Arab, and Latin writings, a fact that signalled the beginning of the Renaissance - that the Letters of Amerigo Vespucci first appeared. These letters, like a revelation, speak of a novus mundus, a new world of unknown flora, fauna, and men, that contradicts the findings of Ptolemy‘s eminent Cosmography (published in 1478, in Rome), Theophrastus's History of Plants (published in 1498, in Venice), and the hallowed treatises of Aristotle, which were then in fashion.

The longing for aerial flight has been one of mankind's most consuming preoccupations. A burning desire for lightness, verticality, and flight is opposed to the fatality of universal gravity. Jules Michelet, in his study of the subject, entitled L'Oiseau (The Bird), which he wrote toward the end of his life, deems this aspiration for upward motion to be characteristic of all nature. He writes: “It is the cry of all the earth, of the world and of all life… : ‘Wings! We want wings, we want flight and movement.’” From ancient times, this basic element of physical experience has nourished human imagination and been a source of motivation for the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Mesopotamian civilization had its winged divinities and spirits; indeed the Western tradition of depicting winged persons has been linked to the influence of Mesopotamian art. As Jules Duhem has pointed out, four centuries before Jesus Christ, Aristotle himself was already exploring certain notions that have become part of the history of ideas of aeronautics and astronomy. Among these are the ideas of void, weight, the resistance of air, and the movement of birds and other flying creatures. Duhem has also demonstrated that Aristotle proposed an explanation, as imperfect as it was, for what causes projectiles to fall from the sky. Throughout the ages, humanity has continually expressed its desire to fly: “Man is proud of being free and of leaning on nothing,” Elias Canetti has written in regard to man's upright position. Striking examples of the impulse to fly are to be found not only in scientific discourse but in myths, literature, and works of art.

The forms of Central Asian shamanism owe their relative homogeneity both to a commonly shared tradition and the influence of Islam. It is, however, possible to distinguish two distinct tendencies, which correspond to the two ethnic groups that inhabit this region, one Iranian-speaking and the other Turkish-speaking. At the same time, the process of Islamization does not in itself prevent the preservation of certain elements of shamanism pertaining both to the thought and practice of these Muslim peoples, nor to their secondary, non-official religious activities. In addition, certain customs that were developed within Islam itself, such as Sufism and transvestism, are believed by some investigators to have points of contact with shamanism.

Jean-Pierre Changeux's Neuronal Man attempts to define mental activity, that is thought, with respect to the neurophysiology of the brain.*

Since antiquity, the historical account of these problems has undergone the examination of classical notions: what is a mental image, a concept, a representation? Changeux, who accepts these traditional points of departure, as well as the notion of signification, aims to clarify the physical, neurophysiological counterparts of these notions, in order to arrive at less simplistic terms: image de memoire “memory image,” later - objet mental “mental object,” and still later - objet de mémoire “memory object.” Behind these terms lies transition to neurophysiology, with the notion of engram, and finally with the notion of trace, a notion which is precise but very general, since the substantive reality of these traces, their anatomy and physiology in the brain has yet to be determined.

A great quantity of American plants traveled with the precious metals that arrived in Europe from New Spain after ‘1492. Some were brought over intentionally, perhaps in the hands of some Spanish Indian (Spaniards who had travelled to the New World to make their fortunes and had returned were called “Indians”) who had become accustomed to new tastes in America. Others arrived by neither will nor invitation, hidden in the nooks and crannies of the ships or mixed in with the ballast that the galleons carried on their return trip to the Old World.

Long ago the Chinese people developed the habit of thinking in terms of images. They also formed the habit of writing and recognizing scriptforms in terms of images. In fact, these diverse cognitive processes - thinking, writing and decoding in terms of images - have been interacting and reinforcing one another for thousands of years, and, as a result, have played a significant role in shaping Chinese culture and the Chinese mind, and have become a part of the collective unconscious of the people.

Although today the Chinese characters are highly abstract and symbolic, the language still preserves its pictographic and ideographic prototypes, the parent script which evolved almost six thousand years ago. In other words, although modern Chinese characters are no longer actual drawings of objects, ideas, and images, they still have a blood relationship to these primitive forms. Their graphemes, configurations, or grapho-semantic radicals still bear direct semantic relation to their referents, so much so that it would be fair to describe the development of Chinese writing as an overlapping process as well as a gradual one.

In the Himalayan region, and even beyond it, odd behavior, illnesses, and especially sudden or accidental deaths, are attributed to the actions of the dead who have come back to torment the living.

Among the Limbu tribesmen of eastern Nepal, these attacks take many different forms. The symptoms have very little in common from illness to illness. The eyes of infants roll back into their heads; they refuse to take the breast and die after only several months of life (they are called sa-sik). Women – as well as men – remain infertile, and are subject to bouts of confusion and temporary madness. Pregnancies often come to bad endings: there are spontaneous abortions, death in childbirth (sugup), an inability to produce milk. Men complain of stomach aches, tremendous headaches, vertigo, and various other troubles: they too are stricken with temporary madness, with loss of consciousness, and with inexplicable terrors that lead to fatal accidents or that even drive the victim, in a fit of rage, to murder or suicide (sogha). People of both sexes and all ages are affected. At home the family chickens often die suddenly and pigs choke to death.

When the world reveals a part of its beauty, what should our reaction be? How can we respond adequately? Is not our initial reaction one of a “discrepancy between our impressions and their habitual expression?” It is this question that Proust poses in one of the crucial passages early on in his masterpiece. Describing his walks along Méséglise's Way, and “the humble discoveries” he made there, the narrator details for us the overwhelming, decisive impression made on him by a shaft of sunlight:

The existence of a partnership between knowledge and armies - and, connected with it, between knowledge and wars, conquests, and the entire apparatus of empires - has been affirmed since the time of Xenophon. The troops clear a path that the scholars follow, and an increase of knowledge is a side effect of the incursion. The great linguistic discoveries of the eighteenth century - that is, the Zend and Sanskrit languages - would have been impossible without the expansion of the French and British empires into Asia; and Bonaparte, in his foray into Egypt, was accompanied by a large contingent of scholars. After the uniformed troops march in, official scholarly missions follow. For example, in 1849, Italian archives were opened to French scholars as a result of the French occupation of Rome. Renan's access to Italian libraries, monasteries, and manuscript collections was a result of the presence of French troops in Italy. This was a period of preliminary analyses, of the publication of catalogues, and of amazement at the wealth of available documents. In brief, it was a period of successful compilation, of rapid and exhilarating erudition. It was a time when everything rang true. In 1860, it was once more Renan who set off, on the margins of the French intervention in Syria and Lebanon, in search of epigraphical materials. In fact, all of nineteenth-century French, German, and English archaeology follows in the wake of the colonial expansion of the various empires.

The characteristic features of Siberia - its vast, sparsely settled expanses, its small population and harsh climate - apply particularly to the region inhabited by the Nganasan people, the most northerly of Eurasia. Their language belongs to the Samoyed branch of the Uralian linguistic group. They live in isolation and in precarious living conditions on the Taimyr archipelago, dispersed over an immense territory (200,000 square kilometers) that they have settled extremely sparsely (the entire population seems to have hardly ever exceeded one thousand). This circumstance, which explains their relative social and economic stagnation, has also marked Nganasan culture, favoring the retention of specifically Siberian elements, notably the role of shamanism.

The year 1992 is a year for reflection, because whether or not the quincentenary celebration of the arrival of the Europeans to this continent seems justified, one cannot escape thinking about the impact of this event on our land.

As archeology is my area of study, my reflections are directed toward the changes that came about in the relationship between man and animals after 1492, specifically toward what occurred in Mexico once the Spaniards established themselves in this territory.

There inevitably comes a time when even the best informed minds are tempted to yield to the lure of binarism: when we are no longer concerned with the details of a system, but rather with our vision of the relationship between man and the world. Without going any further it can already be said that the problem of existence is presented to us in terms of a man/world duality, as though we were unable to exceed our subjective vision of things so as to assess their intrinsic reality.

When linguists discovered that they could isolate discrete units called phonemes, they were tempted to oppose the discontinuity of these phonemes – reflecting the underlying discontinuity of the signifiers – to a continuum of prelinguistic experience, a continuum that is not arranged as discrete elements except with reference to any significant units of the language selected for the purpose of communicating this experience to others. At the outset we have nothing but a nebulous mass where only the application of a linguistic grid allows us to discern identifiable units. Even if, in the final analysis, it will prove necessary to doubt the universal validity of this vision of things, we must recognize its usefulness in concretizing a concept of linguistic facts – a concept that has for some time played a beneficent role in research. At least for some of us, this vision should reflect the manner in which the world is gradually organized in our minds each time a perceptible reality is isolated from its context at the instant it receives a name. Allow me to introduce an illustration from personal experience. It was the last day of July in 1914. In our little village in the Savoy the international tension – which would eventually end in general mobilization – was very perceptible; our classes were idle, and teachers and pupils had settled down in a field near the school. I was six. Sitting on the grass, my attention was attracted by a plant with large flat leaves. At that moment someone said the word plantain “plantain.” The plant had not been heretofore exactly unknown to me; it didn't strike me, at that moment, as a discovery; but it acquired a distinct existence only at that instant in the green carpet of the field when a signifier had definitively isolated it. It was most assuredly the gravity of the hour that engraved this incident in my memory.