Cosmologies

The anthropological study of cosmologies has most often coincided with examinations of religion, and thus owes its greatest intellectual debt to Durkheim's insistence that the basis of religion, and systems of classificatory thought, are eminently social. Tracing this line of thought through the anthropological work on religion since Durkheim, this article suggests that an examination of a culture's myth, ritual, and iconography reveals how its cosmology conveys the relationship between social rupture and social integration. In a discussion which considers a variety of ethnographic contexts, and focuses on the Andean case more deeply, the classificatory principle of dualism plays a central role by emphasizing reciprocity and thereby conveying the idea of an integrated cosmos.