OPERATIVE ASPECTS OF FOLK CLASSIFICATION

Claudine Friedberg Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris

Today the power of classifying environmental elements is considered a fundamental aspect of the adaptive capacities of living organisms. Like any other animal, Man uses this power in his relations with the outside world and particularly towards plants and animals which are his biological environment. The difference is that, through language, his classifications can be objects of communication to his fellow men. Thus, classificatory phenomena reveal themselves through nomenclatures used for referring to objects.

Although nomenclatures are the most accessible external sign of classifications, we must never lose sight of the fact that systems of naming are only one of the various aspects of classificatory processes that humans bring into play. When studying folk classifications of natural objects, such as plants and animals, we must always keep in mind the complexity of operations involved in these processes and ponder over the relations between them. Indeed unlike scholarly classifications which are consciously worked out, what we call folk classifications result from cognitive operations which are not always fully conscious and are carried out as and when needed. And as Ralph Bulmer liked to stress:

[Informants’] classifications and categories . . . constitute a frame for storing and conveying experienceand information in the day-to-day business of living (Bulmer 1974b:82).

The cognitive operations concerned fall into the following three fields whose interdependence is difficult to characterise and to delimit, and so is a source of confusion in studying classifications:

1. Perception/identification2. Naming/communication3. Reference to an order.

Nomenclature cannot be considered as directly linked to perception because: (a) perception and language are not necessarily linked, (b) vocabulary has a development of its own related to the history of the society that uses it. Besides, reference to an order may be of two types: factual and analogical. Indeed the classificatory capacities of Man are revealed in different ways:

1. When classifying in the same category elements considered as being of the same nature,2. When making symbolic or metaphoric correlations between elements belonging to different domains.

The latter type of classification which takes into account only very few natural objects, plants and animals,is the one that anthropologists have noticed first because of its correlation with human groups, lineages, clans, moieties, etc., to which such and such plant or animal species are associated. Hence the idea that classifications are idiosyncratic phenomena, peculiar to each culture and inaccessible to comparison. It is only when ethnoscience and research on classifications of the world of natural objects started that universal concepts about them could become of interest.

Due to their accessibility, systems of nomenclature have provided the primary focus of ethnoscientific research. This approach has reinforced the tendency to consider classifications as the mechanical products of perception, passively received by the brain. In fact, they are an instrument of mastering the environment and therefore should be considered in their operative aspect. We will examine below the interferences between the cognitive operations and the technical and symbolic practices.

NATURE OF COGNITIVE OPERATIONSA great deal of the controversy about anthropologists’ use of folk taxonomies as a basis for generalising

about patterns of thinking in human societies arose from the fact that they have too often tried to deduce cognitive operations directly from nomenclatures. In fact, if there is indeed a relationship between these two things, the nature of the cognitive operations must be examined first.

On the one hand there are neuro-physiological operations, characteristic of the human species. On the other hand there are those operations falling within the particular circumstances in which classification takes place; these circumstances can be defined through environmental parameters, some of them socio-cultural and others ecological. Distinguishing between the circumstantial and the invariant is difficult under the conditions of ethnographic field work. This kind of research must be done within the framework of a comparative experimental psychology. However the various findings made in anthropology and psychology coincide in some respects.

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PROCEDURES OF CLASSIFICATIONResearchers usually ask their informants how they recognise such-and-such a plant or animal. In some

cases, informants provide recognition criteria. This is a componential procedure corresponding to

a situation of membership of a class: the existence of specific features (defined as the union of intersection) is the necessary and sufficient condition for membership of a class (Bresson 1986:968).

But informants are frequently unable to clearly explicate the reasons they name a plant or animal so and so. This observation which was also made by psychologists through their experiments brought the latter to define the notion of prototype as:

[an] exemplary feature, and not a composite or intermediate image, which then becomes the privileged naming medium: the prototype, as a feature, plays the part of the evocative representative to characterize any instances likely to be named by resemblance (closeness). . . The prototype corresponds not only to the variability between objects but also to the variability of their presentations (Bresson 1986:967; this, and other translations from the French by C.F.).

What the Bunaq of Lamaknen (Timor, Indonesia) say about recognition of plants is consistent with this. What makes it possible to discriminate one plant from another at first sight is the appearance of its leaves (nor), that is, their arrangement and the way they toss about in the wind. In the same way a person may be recognised from far away by their “leaves”, i.e. their gait and gestures (their bearing: dunuqun), before being recognised by their features.1 We have already found the same type of observation in Bulmer and Tyler’s work on the way the Kalam classify frogs:

. . . in the same way as most Europeans need no identification key to aid them in their instantaneous discrimination of cows from horses . . . the characters which they consciously draw attention to may, in fact, only constitute a very small part of the total configuration which is the basis for the informant’s actual recognition of examples of particular speciemes. As Simpson puts it, such “non-technical recognition - identification - is normally not by . . . separate characters but by a mental image of the whole animal” (Bulmer and Tyler 1968:353).

In practice, the difference between these two types of procedure - componential and prototypic - is not always easy to make. Indeed although they have recognised a natural object nearly instantaneously informants are frequently able to provide visual recognition criteria. This leads us to the connectionist hypothesis that divides cognitive phenomena into two categories:

The first category - roughly corresponding to the higher processes (often conscious, closely related to reasoning in the literal sense, relatively slow and including context, beliefs and knowledge of different sorts) - falls within the cognitive field. The second one - lower processes (often unconscious, closely related to perception, fast automatic, in other words independent from context) - falls within the connectionist field (Andler 1987:23).

In the domain of reading, in particular, observations showed that:

a number of different pieces of information must be kept in mind at once. Each plays a part, constraining others and being constrained by them. What kinds of mechanisms seem well suited to these task demands? Intuitively, these tasks seem to require mechanisms in which each aspect of the information in the situation can act on other aspects, simultaneously influencing other aspects and being influenced by them. To articulate these intuitions, we and others have turned to a class of models we call Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) models (Rumelhart et al 1986, vol. 1:10).

In some cases, the procedure for the recognition of plants seems to have certain similarities to the reading one. That is what I have recently found myself for the identification of bamboos and banana trees by Alune- speaking populations in Seram. We may put forward the hypothesis that recognition goes at first through a prototypic procedure leading people to give the same basic term to all banana trees or to classify all bamboos in an implicit category. Indeed, although there is no corresponding term in Alune, the word bam bu is spontaneously applied to this category when informants speak in Indonesian. For a further identification, in this case the attribution of a basic term, it seems that a recognition of prototypic type may be possible when the silhouette of a bamboo which, in the informants’ opinion, varies according to each type, can be seen from far away. But when it is seen closer to, for example on the side of a path, it is a conjunction of features that makes the identification possible; yet the question asked about the identity of the bamboo is so quickly answered that

104 Claudine Friedberg

it cannot be an actual awareness of all the criteria taken into account. Besides, when the question By what did you recognise if! is asked, it is only step by step and with hesitation that the characteristic features are obtained. One then notices that this identification proceeds from differentiations and parallels, by successively taking all possibilities two by two and by including in them characteristics some of which are impossible to express in words, like the general aspect of leaves for example.

The same type of observation can be made for the identification of banana trees before they bear fmit. Then one notices a whole range of possibilities from a progressive analysis of the characteristics to an immediate recognition which can be made explicit, a posteriori, by a conjunction of features referring to the arrangement and the coloration of marks on the trunk, the colour of the latter, the more or less upward position of leaves, their shape, the coloration of their veins, etc.

The overall impression that we get from the processes involved is comparable to what psychologists observe in the reading process. It is as if there were an actual reading of the plants making the material of the landscape, just as letters make the material of a hand-written or typed page words, with the same set of simultaneous constraints. Indeed we may rightfully think that the mental capacities used for reading, which appeared only late in the history of mankind, had already been used for another purpose.

The procedures for recognising natural objects are suited to concrete situations and in this field there are big differences between identifying plants and animals. Animals are mobile and often only a glimpse of them can be caught, but they can be recognised by their cries. For plants, the prototypic procedure is to be considered only in cases where a great part of the plant is visible. It is particularly suited to trees and isolated bushes, on the edge of the forest or in scattered vegetation.

The conceptual componential procedure is necessary when the plant cannot be seen in its entirety. It is often the case for lianas, as with the Bunaq (Friedberg 1986, 1990) and for trees in humid tropical forests, neither the silhouette nor the leaves of which can be seen (the latter being too high) and whose identification proceeds from the analysis of the external and internal characteristics of the trunk after cutting it (Sastre 1980).

But, more often than not, combining the two procedures is necessary to identify the terminal taxa of both plants or animals. However, one should keep in mind that criteria of a conceptual componential type, cited by informants as characteristic of some plant or animal, may be used as an a posteriori justification and not in the identification process itself. We must retain the hypothesis that these criteria may be used in a subconscious cognitive process with the procedure of multiple and simultaneous constraints.

THE BASIC LEVEL: PSYCHOLOGISTS’ EXPERIMENTS AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS’ OBSERVATIONS

Another point on which anthropologists and psychologists agree is the existence of a basic level:

Among the numerous levels of abstraction at which a given object may be classified, there is a level of basic abstraction at which the organism can obtain the maximal information with the least cognitive effort (Rosch 1976:248).

The following chart shows, as an example, two of the nine taxonomies that Rosch used as stimuli, with the particular purpose of establishing their basic levels.

TABLE 1. TWO TAXONOMIES FROM ROSCH (1976)

Upper level Basic level Lower level+ 1 0 - 1

NON BIOLOGICAL TAXONOMIESTrousers Levis (jeans) Flannel trousers

Clothes Socks Knee socks Ankle socksShirt Dress shirt Undershirt

BIOLOGICAL TAXONOMIESMaple Canadian maple Sugar maple

Tree Birch Birch-wart White birchOak Holm oak Red oak

‘Basic level’ corresponds to what ethnoscientists call ‘basic terms’. An ambiguity has resulted from calling this level generic, and calling the lower level (-1) (referred to by a basic term + an attribute) specific, because this usage brings about confusion with the Linnaean binomial nomenclatural system: genus + species.

In some cases both systems agree, in so far as the Linnaean nomenclature is prompted by common sense (Atran 1986), but it is not always true. For example, in French the term ch ine corresponds to the genus

Operative Aspects o f Folk Classification 105

Quercus, the term carotte to the species Daucus carota, chardon to several species which are members of several genera from the Compositeae family but also of the Eryngium genera from the Umbellifereae family, and lastly the term mousse to a whole Order. The fact that one cannot predict which naming term the basic level corresponds to is illustrated by Rosch’s experiments. Indeed, she observed that among city dwellers the basic level corresponds to the term ‘tree’ used at the higher level by rural populations.

THE TAXONOMIC STATUS OF NAMING TERMS AT THE BASIC LEVEL AND THE LOWER LEVELS

At the beginning of research in ethnoscience, researchers tried to analyse nomenclatures from the linguistic point of view (for example, H.C. Conklin’s (1962) distinction between unitary simple, unitary complex and composite lexeme), without always raising the question of the relations between the linguistic form and the taxonomic status of the object referred to. Yet, as early as 1968, Bulmer had drawn attention to this matter:

Distinction needs to be made between the morpho-syntactic status of terms which Karam apply to animals, the formal semantic status of named Karam categories vis-a-vis each other, and the status of Karam named categories in relation to implicit, unnamed categories and to the people’s knowledge and perception of fauna (Bulmer and Tyler 1968:437).

The taxonomic levels lower than the basic level are referred to by a basic term and, usually, by a single attribute: for example chine vert, chêne liêge or chardon bêni, chardon Roland. In some cases, there may be more than one level below the basic level; for each of them another attribute is added; for example, carotte rouge longue de Croissy. At each level naming terms are in mutually exclusive contrast to each other. However, there are many cases where basic terms are used alone and where therefore there is no taxonomic lower level. Thus we find a high percentage of basic terms, also called monotypic term s, used for one type of plant only. A few examples concerning the classification of plants are given in the following table.2

TABLE 2: PERCENTAGES OF MONOTYPICAL TERMS FOR PLANTS

POPULATIONS STUDIED MONOTYPICAL TERMS (%)Aka Pygmies 82Mozambo, farmers, neighbours of the latter 86Bunaq (Timor, Indonesia) 68Tzeltal (South of Mexico) 82Aguarana (Amazonian forest) 83Ndambu (New Guinea) 86Hanunoo (Philippines) 57

From an early stage in his ethnobiological work, Bulmer had felt the necessity of defining a basic unit of taxonomic structure. It is what he called natural kind or specieme (by analogy with phoneme or morpheme):

. . . fundamental to Karam classification of frogs (and other vertebrate animals) is their appreciation of natural kinds or speciemes; that is, groups of creatures marked off from all other animals known to them by multiple distinctions of appearance, habitat and behaviour. These natural kinds seem logically entirely comparable with the natural kinds implicit in prescientific European natural history or with what Ernst Mayr calls the non dimensional species of Linnaeus (Bulmer 1968:349).

In numerous cases this specieme therefore corresponds to the modem concept of biological species proposed by Ernst Mayr (1982:273): “a species is a reproductive community constituted by populations (isolated from others) which occupies a particular ecological niche”.3 While the correspondence: basic unit = specieme/biological species = Linnaean binomial / basic level / monotypic basic term, is more frequent, the fact that we also find the correspondence: basic unit = specieme / biological species = Linnaean binomial / level -1 / basic term + attribute, remains a problem for researchers. Writing of the Kalam, Bulmer notes:

In the case of vertebrate animals, 77% of uninomials apply to categories within which they do not recognise complex internal differentiation, 16% to groups within which such internal differentiation is recognised, and 7% to divisions (e.g. sexually dimorphic forms, or lifestages) within or cross-cutting species.

106 Claudine Friedberg

Berlin (1973) formulates a hypothesis about the evolution of taxonomic systems: in the course of history each human group would have passed from the first type of correspondence to the second by subdividing generic terms to produce sets of specific terms. Here is Bulmer’s comment on this hypothesis:

One may agree with Berlin that in the normal process of elaboration of systems of classification it is probably standard for uninomial originally applied to an undifferentiated collectivity to change in time to apply to a differentiated one. Berlin sees the process of elaboration as, normally, hitherto undifferentiated generic becoming subdivided to include specifics. I would see the same process as, in many cases, one of terms initially applied to single species being upgraded to become generic names, through the recognition of additional related species (Bulmer 1974a: 22-3).

The simplest case (but one which is far from being as common as we have been given to understand) is where a biological genus is represented by only one species in the speech community’s territory. In this case it may seem normal that the genus be represented by a single basic term. But it happens that, even here, the plant or animal shares its basic term with other members of other genera and is referred to by a basic term + attribute. To illustrate this problem I shall take examples from the botanical nomenclature of the Bunaq of Timor.

As far as cultivated plants are concerned, each species generally has a different basic term in Bunaq and each variety is then distinguished by one or several attributes. This is the case for all cereals and some tubers; each new variety introduced will be added to the list with another or several attributes. However it is not an absolutely unbreakable rule; for example the two most commonly cultivated species of yam have the same basic term dik. For pulses the basic term ho not only covers three cultivated species of Vigna as well as their varieties but also non-cultivated small leguminous plants with non-edible seeds (a Phaseolus, two Cassia and even a cultivated M alvaceae, the gumbo, probably recently introduced and called ho hotel ‘tree’), as well as Euphorbia tirucalli L., a plant with a succulent stem and spare leaves named ho molo ‘betel leaf’ because its cylindrical stem looks like cowpea pods and the betel inflorescence.

So we see here a taxon develop by internal diversification and by external addition at the same time, the criterion of membership possibly being either a morphological resemblance or the fact of possessing small edible seeds. Yet other pulses bear other basic terms: tir for the pigeon pea, and p a o for the lablab bean (cowpea). P ao was also applied to lima beans when these were introduced, probably because the shape of their inflorescences and pods evoke the lablab bean.

The way names are given to introduced plants tells a lot about the way the membership criteria of such-and- such a taxon depend both on particular features of the plant itself and on its role in the life of the society. In this way, the Bunaq taxon balo includes: the Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, a taro cultivated of old; also a more recently introduced one, the Xanthosoma sagittifolium (L.) Schott; lastly a wild local Colocasia without edible tubers. In this case the three plants are morphologically somewhat similar. On the other hand the introduced hot pepper (Capsicum ) has been given the same name as a local plant, pata l (Piper retrofractum Vahl), which it does not in the least resemble. Its spiky fruit, however, is also used as a condiment and has become known as the ‘hot pepper of the masters of the land’ (patal muk gomo).

The basic name of an introduced cultivated plant which has become important in the life of a society is sometimes also attributed to a wild local plant. For example, the local Psychotria montana (s.l.) is called kopi zon, i.e. ‘wild coffee’, by the Bunaq. The same thing occurs with the name for tobacco, bako, derived from Portuguese, used with the attribute zon for Blumea balsam ifera (L.) DC., a Com positae with large leaves rather like those of tobacco.

For wild plants, it is even more difficult to set any rule. The two species of A lstonia found in Bunaq territory are called zoil, one with the attribute guzu (black), the other with the attribute belis (white) because the foliage of the former is darker than that of the latter. For the tree they call ziek, the Bunaq make the same distinction between a black and a white type, but in this case the types are, for botanists, members of a single species, whose appearance varies according to altitude (Pittosporum moluccanum [Lam.] Miq.). On the other hand, the three Albizia (Mimosaceae) of the Lamaknen flora have different basic terms: zul, hepa, e. The latter is also given to two small herbaceous leguminous plants, e gol ‘small’ and e lotu ‘short’, which have the same type of leaves as e.

On the whole, arborescent leguminous plants have different basic names in Bunaq, but one notices that some of these names of trees, such as, for example, besak for Acacia leucophloea Willd., are also found in other Timorese languages, although the latter belong to another linguistic family. Unfortunately, we do not know the history of plant names for these languages. However, one may suppose they evolve according to the same rules as the rest of vocabulary:

Operative Aspects o f Folk Classification 107

the most frequent words are subject to an internal renewal within the language, the least frequent to an external renewal (Haudricourt and Hedin 1943: 99-100).

HIGHER TAXONOMICAL LEVELS AND INTERFERENCES BETWEEN CLASSIFICATORY PROCESSES AND ENVIRONMENTAL, ECOLOGICAL OR SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXTS

At basic and lower levels the classification of plants or animals is determined by those characteristics that are perceptible to the senses, particularly the visual. But higher level groupings depend more on their ecological and socio-cultural environment and, in particular, on the technical and symbolical practices of which they are the object.

Understanding higher level groupings involves observing how they appear in the speech and life of those using them. With plants, higher level categories are likely to play a part in the identification process, where the choices made begin with one high-level group, not a survey covering all. Higher categories grouping plants bearing different basic names are implicit as we saw above with the bamboos in Seram. Other, named categories may appear spontaneously in speech to refer to groups of plants involved in the life of members of the society concerned. For example, the Bunaq term dalo dik ‘yam, taro’ appears in ritual texts to refer to plants bearing edible tubers; and hotel upan gutu ‘tree with a certain type of petiole’ refers to a set formed by palm trees and banana trees which are under the protection of guardians of the produce of the land. These higher level categories are thus more often than not complex, defined by criteria from several fields.

Here as well Bulmer has been a pioneer when he explains how a single term refers both to frogs and small mammals:

As, with exception of gwnm, which are never eaten, are not categorically unclean, but are “soft” food, liable to “stink” or “rot” (kwy gp). Provided they have not come from latrine areas or other unclean places most kinds may be eaten by all women and children and most men, but may not be eaten by youths in the period between their nose-piercing and their final release from initiation rites in the smy festivals, nor by some adult men who possess particular kinds of sorcery or magic (Bulmer 1968:352).

Bulmer was later to give further explanation, in his preface to Part II of Birds o f M y Kalam Country:

Kalam themselves acknowledge that there are only very small differences between rats that are rats (kopyak) and rats that are frogs (as), while the differences between both of these and the smaller of the “giant rats” which count as “game mammals” (kmn) are also not great. Dietary and culinary practices, including ritual cooking of most “game mammals” and traditional prohibitions and restrictions on eating certain of these creatures, as well as hunting and collecting methods, are the main factors sustaining this classification (Majnep and Bulmer 1977: 46).

Inuit carry out the same type of classification when classifying mammals into three categories: those that may be eaten by a person alone, those that may be shared within the family, and those that are shared within the community.

As far as plants are concerned, their ecological environment may provide a basis for classification. The popular categories of biotope are sometimes the only classifications carried out with plants bearing different basic terms, in particular in very man-made environments, where agricultural societies have been settled for a long time.4

However biotope characteristics are not always sufficient to define a category. The land status, the type of utilisation, and the life form are also often taken into account. For example bula, for the Bunaq, refers at the same time to a set of small herbaceous plants often found in meadows, to the type of vegetation resulting from these grasses and to all the land where cattle may graze and which also bears shrubby and arboreous vegetation.Life forms may play the part of a comprehensive category but more often are associated with another characteristic; for example, for the Bunaq, hotel deu goq, ‘trees used for building’; but the same observations have been made by many other researchers (Randall and Hunn 1984, Hunn 1987). When life forms constitute a category of their own - at least as for plants - they are often residual categories formed by plants which do not fall into any of the functional categories recognised by the population. Life forms may also be considered as biological categories like any others, and may then appear as an attribute in level -1 to distinguish plants bearing the same basic term; for example tupa hotel and tupa mun applied to two species of Derris used as a fishing poison, the former arborescent hotel, the latter lianescent mun.

Nonetheless it seems that use-based classifications cannot constitute categories of the vegetable world by themselves: the criterion of use is always combined with a biological characteristic. For example, the category titiq ual includes plants used for their fibres which are in fact characterised by the texture of their phloem;

108 Claudine Friedberg

moreover they belong to a small number of botanical families possessing this particularity: M alvaceae, Tiliac eae, Sterculiaceae, Moraceae.

However, there is often a disjunction between the groupings of plants bearing the same basic term and the higher rank categories. In this way, in the examples already supplied for the taxon balo, balo sai katoq, Colocasia sp. without tuber, do not fall into the balo dik category of plants bearing tubers but into those of water plants: il gie\ the same observations can be made for certain plants bearing the same basic term ho which does not belong to the comprehensive category of pulse (ho tir). In other words, if there is always a transitive relation between level 0 and the lower levels, it is not necessarily the case between the latter and the levels higher than the basic level. That is, taxa are not necessarily in hierarchised mutually inclusive contrast.

CONCLUSIONFolk classifications are rarely created from a conscious desire to classify objects. They reflect the need to

organise knowledge in order to master it while serving as a tool for the appropriaation and socialisation of nature.

Morphological characteristics play an essential part in the recognition of objects but situating them may involve other elements. When a tree is identified, it may be one of a set used for building or of another set found only in a certain ecological environment. For cognitive efficiency, Man has had to develop conceptual categories that keep up with the complexity of the situations he has to face, that is, categories which take into account at the same time floristic, ecological, and land property status as well as technical and symbolic utilisation. Invariants cannot be the categories themselves but the cognitive instruments and processes that enable people to establish categories.

Bulmer was able to work out the principles that underlie the Kalam knowledge of nature in part because he possessed a good practical knowledge of the natural environment in which he had grown up.5 It was obvious to him that the cognitive instruments of the Kalam informants were the same as his own, even though their motivations were different and their conception of nature had developed in a different ecological and social context. By following Kalam hunters in the forest with both the patience of the anthropologist and the passion of the naturalist, by listening to them talk about the animals encountered or glimpsed, he opened for us a better understanding of the way their knowledge is organised.

NOTES

1. For data concerning the Bunaq, see Friedberg 1986 and 1990.2. The data concerning Aka Pygmies and Lobay’e Monzombo (Central Africa) have been calculated by Bahuchet

from J.M.C. Thomas and S. Bahuchet (1981), and E. Motte (1980). The data for Timor’s Bunaq are my own. The rest are taken from B. Berlin (1976).

3. cf. comments of S. Atran (1986:158, note 34).4. Refer to the observations of B. Meilleur (1984) in the French Alps.5. Refer in particular to what he says about his memories of an amateur ornithologist and his field practice in

Bulmer (1974b: 79-99).

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INTEREST, USE, AND INTEREST IN USES IN FOLK BIOLOGY

Terence E. Hays Rhode Island College

Impressively detailed folk classifications of animals and plants have now been reported for a wide range of human societies (Brown 1984) and several regions of the world are represented by intensive, long-term field studies, such as that of the Kalam by Ralph Bulmer and his co-workers. General, if not universal, features of these systems have been identified - though agreement on these is not complete (Hays 1983) - and we are no longer surprised to learn of folk biological taxonomies five or even six levels in depth with inventories approaching or exceeding a thousand distinct named taxa.

By contrast, with the exception of gardening hobbyists and amateur naturalists the folk systems of average urban Westerners appear to be relatively simple. Content to make only the grossest kinds of distinctions, perhaps many of us share the indifference expressed by that Everyman, Alexander Portnoy, who says (Roth 1971:251):

Greenery I leave to the birds and the bees, they have their worries, I have mine. At home who knows the name of what grows from the pavement at the front of our house? It’s a tree - and that’s it.

Why should there be such a contrast? Why do “the folk” classify their natural surroundings in such detail? Anthropologists have generally offered two kinds of general answers to the latter question. The first, which may be designated the intellectual view and is represented by Lêvi-Strauss (1966:9,10) among others, contends that classifying “has a value of its own”, which is to satisfy a pan-human “demand for order”. In