Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies - Rilegato

Berlin, Brent

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691094691 ISBN 13: 9780691094694

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 1992

Riassunto

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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Recensione

"This well-researched and enthusiastically written book is a major contribution to ethnobiology.... This book is aimed at professional ethnobiologists, but it will also be of value to those who are interested in linguistics, systematics, psychological mechanisms, and the postmodernist debate."--The Quarterly Review of Biology

Contenuti

Pt. 1	Plan
Ch. 1	On the Making of a Comparative Ethnobiology	3
1.1	Intellectualist and Utilitarian Approaches in Ethnobiology	3
1.2	Why Is It Notable That Nonliterates "Know So Much" about Nature?	5
1.3	The Bases of Ethnobiological Classification	8
1.4	Relativist and Comparativist Approaches in Ethnobiology	11
1.5	General Principles of Ethnobiological Classification, 1966-1976	13
1.6	Band-aids or Tune-up? General Principles, 1989	20
1.7	Summary of General Principles	31
1.8	The Changing Conventions of Data Presentation as a Reflection of Changing Theory in Ethnobiological Classification	35
Ch. 2	The Primacy of Generic Taxa in Ethnobiological Classification	52
2.1	The Selected Subset of Plants and Animals	53
2.2	The Concept of the Genus: Historical Antecedents	54
2.3	Evidence for the Perceptual Salience of Generic Taxa	60
2.4	Generic Taxa, Ethnobiological Rank, and Analytic Terminology	64
2.5	On Predicting the Subset of Generic Taxa	78
2.6	The Internal Structure of Folk Generic Taxa	90
2.7	Nature's Fortune 500+: Empirical Generalizations on the Upper Numbers of Generic Taxa in Systems of Ethnobiological Classification	96
Ch. 3	The Nature of Specific Taxa	102
3.1	Distinctive Biological Properties of Specific Taxa	103
3.2	The Internal Structure of Specific Contrast Sets	108
3.3	Residual Categories?	114
3.4	General Nomenclatural Properties of Specific Taxa	116
3.5	Cultural Factors Contributing to the Recognition of Specific Taxa	118
3.6	Patterns in the Distribution and Size of Specific Contrast Sets	122
Ch. 4	Natural and Not So Natural Higher-Order Categories	134
4.1	Higher-Order Categories in Ethnobiological Classification	138
4.2	Taxa of Intermediate Rank	139
4.3	Taxa of Life-Form Rank	161
4.4	The Nature of Unaffiliated Generic Taxa and the Life-Form Debate	171
4.5	Convert Groupings of Unaffiliated Generics = Covert Life Forms?	176
4.6	The Bases of Life-Form Taxa: Utilitarian vs. Perceptual Motivations	181
4.7	The Plant and Animal Kingdoms	190
Pt. 2	Process
Ch. 5	Patterned Variation in Ethnobiological Knowledge	199
5.1	Werner's Gray-haired Omniscient Native Speaker-Hearer	200
5.2	The Basic Data of Ethnobiological Description and the Search for Patterns	201
5.3	Collecting the Basic Data from Which Patterns Might Emerge	202
5.4	Some Significant Types of Variation in Ethnobiological Knowledge	203
5.5	Discovering the Patterns Underlying the Biological Ranges of Folk Taxa	206
5.6	Some Factors Contributing to Cognitive Variation	223
Ch. 6	Manchung and Bikua: The Nonarbitrariness of Ethnobiological Nomenclature	232
6.1	Early Experiments on Sound Symbolism	234
6.2	Ethnobiological Sound Symbolism in Huambisa: Birds and Fish	235
6.3	Universal Sound Symbolism or Simple Onomatopoeia?	240
6.4	Comparison with Other Ethnoornithological Vocabularies	245
6.5	Fish, Again	247
6.6	Closing Observations on Huambisa Sound Symbolism	249
6.7	"-r-" is for FROG	250
6.8	Lexical Reflections of Cultural Significance	255
Ch. 7	The Substance and Evolution of Ethnobiological Categories	260
7.1	Toward a Substantive Inventory of Ethnobiological Categories	261
7.2	The Evolution of Ethnobiological Categories: Typological Speculations	272
7.3	Epilogue	290
	References	291
	Author Index	309
	Index of Scientific Names	313
	Index of Ethnobiological Names	322
	Subject Index	331

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1992
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0691094691
• ISBN 13: 9780691094694
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 364
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile