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I'm Chilean, and I lived in Bolivia back in 89. I used to travel back and forth all the time, so I got used to see lake Titicaca from the air, and a couple of times on the ground. The place is astonishingly beautiful. Pristine. Ancient. The Aymara people have the deepest connection with their land, and the lake, of any place I've ever been at.

I haven't been back in a long time, but whenever I hear about the Altiplano (the highlands) I get an overwhelming feeling of respect for their people, their land and their culture. In South America (at least definitely in Chile), we're obsessed with modernism, state-of-the-art highways and skyscrapers. Aymaras, on the other hand, seem to live in a place with no time, where even their language expresses the past in front, and the future behind. Their people continue to carve artifacts like that llama today, just like back then.




It’s surprising how much the future being behind as a metaphor makes sense. You can’t see behind you!

I wonder if there is any other indication of a focus on vision, or seeing in their culture.


It's not about vision, it's about movement. We move forward through time, thus we consider the future to be ahead.

It's interesting that vision is antagonistic to movement though when it comes to time metaphors :-)


Maybe we are moving backwards through time and that’s why we can only see clearly into the past. As GP comment hinted at, it’s a matter of cultural perspective.


I don't think cultural perspective as much as pure philosophy. As a coder, I once realized that the entire universe's events could be an existing stack, and in that stack exists the events that create the universe, because of the requirement of consistency. Us experiencing time would just be those events being popped off that stack.

This stack view is equivalent to what you are saying, and there is no reason to believe it can't be the case since it does make consistency easily satiable.


Will not upvoting you help obscure and preserve their culture? I don't know, I guess it's too late for that.




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