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The Correspondence of Jivaroan to Scientific Ornithology
Author(s) -
Boster James,
Berlin Brent,
O'Neill John
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1986.88.3.02a00020
Subject(s) - ornithology , genealogy , history , biology , ecology , southern hemisphere
Previous studies offolk biological classification (Diamond 1966; Bulmer 1967, 1970; Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven 1973, 1974; Hunn 1975) have documented a strong correspondence between the ways folk and scientific systems of biological classification delineate natural discontinuities: folk and scientist alike recognize substantially the same categories ofplants and animals. These studies have used methods that assume that all native informants agree in their assignment of individual organisms to named classes. Unfortunately, this simplifying assumption is inaccurate; informants often disagree in their identifications of particular organisms. In this article we use data on the pattern ofinformant disagreement in specimen identification to establish a second type of correspondence between folk and scientific systems of biological classification: folk and scientist alike recognize substantially the same pattern of resemblance between organisms. Furthermore, variations in the strength of this second type ofcorrespondence are shown to reflect the evolutionary history of the organisms classified.