DECIPHERING EAST-SIDE SOUTH AMERICANS INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS DYNAMICS

Resumo

The impressive results of the editorial project featured in this dossier on the prehistory of the Amazon viewed from the Atlantic flank of South America outline a scientific and ethical success story. The works presented can be seen as a vindication of Max Planck (1950) sinical views of change in science. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it” He re-emphasized the some view in another part of the same book, asserting that “an important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth”. Thomas Kuhn (1962) “Structure of scientific Revolutions” provided a rational explanation and helped understand what happens in the mind of working researchers, scientists and scholars. The development of science studies implementing a sociological frame of analysis to scientific and scholarly institutions (Bourdieu 1988, Latour 1988) further clarifies how researchers and scientists communities effectively operate. It is now well-known that normal science operates along accepted assumptions and operational modes -paradigms - that are shared by researchers’ demes – networks -. This demic structure tends to enforce adhesion to the dominant paradigm at the exclusion of any alternative. Fortunately, contradictory debates or confrontations of research agendas are also integral part of researchers, scientists, and scholars’ daily practices, allowing more effective explanation – sometime significantly delayed – to finally succeed. There is however, no final word in scientific research. A new emerging synthesis always generate new questions, launching a new cycle of conjecture and refutation (Popper 2002).