These allegories express a proposition that is the foundation stone of this paper. I can state the prop- osition in two ways, one of which will seem trite and the other perhaps mystical or foolish. First: all things can be rationalized. Second: all of Western science and historiography is so closely interwoven with Western imperialism that the former can only describe and justify the latter, not predict it or explain it or control it—not even when human survival is at stake, as may now be the case. The second form is easily confused with the “East is East and West is West” form of cultural relativism, an argument which has some predictive use in linguistics, but otherwise merely expresses the fact that cross-cultural communication is always diffi- cult, always imperfect, but never truly impossible. I am trying to say something rather more specific. At this point I need a felicitous term. The word ethnoscience has been used for the past few years to designate an interdisciplinary field on the common border of anthropology, linguistics, geog- raphy, and psychology. That field tries to analyze the cognitive systems—the beliefs about reality—which are characteristic of a given cultural-linguistic universe, and to theorize about such matters on a cross-cultural