Further investigation of the foundation traditions of Metapontium, focusing on the persistence of much more ancient Indo-European mythic traditions and time-reckoning traditions and the presence of those elements in the bricolage that constitutes the Aeolian mythic system of Metapontium foundation narratives and their relationship to Anatolian Aeolian tradition.

The next debate to emerge concerned the idea of relativism. This was central to the Boasian vision of anthropology. Franz Boas believed that no culture is superior to any other, and his anthropology emphasized this. This idea was taken up by his students, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Opposing this we have Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who believed that some cultures are superior to others. Another key figure was Benjamin Lee Whorf. His linguistic relativism sought to explain that languages classify differently. This is also apparent in kinship, where different categorizations might imply different ways of thinking.

As a traveler, Elizabeth Bishop valued direct experience and the particularity of other cultures, key elements of anthropology. During her residence in Brazil, she drew on anthropological works of Richard Burton, Gilberto Freyre, Charles Wagley and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Introducing her translation of Minha Vida de Menina, she cited Burton’s Brazilian travels. She thought Freyre “really gives one some idea what it’s like” to live in Brazil, but, like him, ventured into controversy about race and class in several works, notably “Manuelzinho.” Wagley’s Amazon Town was a direct source of her poem “The Riverman,” articulating her regard for the intuitive power of dreams and dreamlike experience in folk arts and in poems. In works such as “Questions of Travel” and “Crusoe in England,” Bishop reveals her affinity with the skepticism of Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques. Both articulate doubts about modernity and our mastery of knowledge.

The notion that comparison is not the search for similarities but the systematization of differences leads to the question of which shared set of concepts and assumptions might be employed to explore this notion. Comparative analysis should at once reduce the complexity of data in the service of comparison and yet still reference the uniqueness and specificity of local values and ideas. Three types of comparison potentially fulfill these criteria. Claude Lévi-Strauss traces the transformations of oppositions and codes across cultural boundaries without claiming to compare societies as such. Louis Dumont contrasts systems of values that represent societies-as-wholes by analyzing their structuring into hierarchical levels. Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems enables the comparison of relationships between social systems and their environments, without assuming societies as units of comparison – examples being the making of ethnic identities and boundaries. A synthesis of the three approaches provides avenues of comparison in a globalized world, as is exemplified by the author’s own work in upland Southeast Asia.