Full Description
A founder of and leading thinker in the field of modern ethnobiology looks at the widespread regularities in the classification and naming of plants and animals among peoples of traditional, nonliterate societies--regularities that persist across local environments, cultures, societies, and languages. Brent Berlin maintains that these patterns can best be explained by the similarity of human beings' largely unconscious appreciation of the natural affinities among groupings of plants and animals: people recognize and name a grouping of organisms quite independently of its actual or potential usefulness or symbolic significance in human society. Berlin's claims challenge those anthropologists who see reality as a "set of culturally constructed, often unique and idiosyncratic images, little constrained by the parameters of an outside world." Part One of this wide-ranging work focuses primarily on the structure of ethnobiological classification inferred from an analysis of descriptions of individual systems. Part Two focuses on the underlying processes involved in the functioning and evolution of ethnobiological systems in general. Originally published in 1992.
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Contents
Pt. 1PlanCh. 1On the Making of a Comparative Ethnobiology31.1Intellectualist and Utilitarian Approaches in Ethnobiology31.2Why Is It Notable That Nonliterates "Know So Much" about Nature?51.3The Bases of Ethnobiological Classification81.4Relativist and Comparativist Approaches in Ethnobiology111.5General Principles of Ethnobiological Classification, 1966-1976131.6Band-aids or Tune-up? General Principles, 1989201.7Summary of General Principles311.8The Changing Conventions of Data Presentation as a Reflection of Changing Theory in Ethnobiological Classification35Ch. 2The Primacy of Generic Taxa in Ethnobiological Classification522.1The Selected Subset of Plants and Animals532.2The Concept of the Genus: Historical Antecedents542.3Evidence for the Perceptual Salience of Generic Taxa602.4Generic Taxa, Ethnobiological Rank, and Analytic Terminology642.5On Predicting the Subset of Generic Taxa782.6The Internal Structure of Folk Generic Taxa902.7Nature's Fortune 500+: Empirical Generalizations on the Upper Numbers of Generic Taxa in Systems of Ethnobiological Classification96Ch. 3The Nature of Specific Taxa1023.1Distinctive Biological Properties of Specific Taxa1033.2The Internal Structure of Specific Contrast Sets1083.3Residual Categories?1143.4General Nomenclatural Properties of Specific Taxa1163.5Cultural Factors Contributing to the Recognition of Specific Taxa1183.6Patterns in the Distribution and Size of Specific Contrast Sets122Ch. 4Natural and Not So Natural Higher-Order Categories1344.1Higher-Order Categories in Ethnobiological Classification1384.2Taxa of Intermediate Rank1394.3Taxa of Life-Form Rank1614.4The Nature of Unaffiliated Generic Taxa and the Life-Form Debate1714.5Convert Groupings of Unaffiliated Generics = Covert Life Forms?1764.6The Bases of Life-Form Taxa: Utilitarian vs. Perceptual Motivations1814.7The Plant and Animal Kingdoms190Pt. 2ProcessCh. 5Patterned Variation in Ethnobiological Knowledge1995.1Werner's Gray-haired Omniscient Native Speaker-Hearer2005.2The Basic Data of Ethnobiological Description and the Search for Patterns2015.3Collecting the Basic Data from Which Patterns Might Emerge2025.4Some Significant Types of Variation in Ethnobiological Knowledge2035.5Discovering the Patterns Underlying the Biological Ranges of Folk Taxa2065.6Some Factors Contributing to Cognitive Variation223Ch. 6Manchung and Bikua: The Nonarbitrariness of Ethnobiological Nomenclature2326.1Early Experiments on Sound Symbolism2346.2Ethnobiological Sound Symbolism in Huambisa: Birds and Fish2356.3Universal Sound Symbolism or Simple Onomatopoeia?2406.4Comparison with Other Ethnoornithological Vocabularies2456.5Fish, Again2476.6Closing Observations on Huambisa Sound Symbolism2496.7"-r-" is for FROG2506.8Lexical Reflections of Cultural Significance255Ch. 7The Substance and Evolution of Ethnobiological Categories2607.1Toward a Substantive Inventory of Ethnobiological Categories2617.2The Evolution of Ethnobiological Categories: Typological Speculations2727.3Epilogue290References291Author Index309Index of Scientific Names313Index of Ethnobiological Names322Subject Index331
