© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 31
A. Si, The Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Solega, Ethnobiology,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24681-9_2
Chapter 2
Ethnotaxonomies and Universals:
Investigating some Key Assumptions
2.1 Introduction
It is often stated that the study of ethnotaxonomies have great potential to inform
theories on human language in general, and, by extension, human cognition as a
whole. It is claimed that there are strong regularities among the folk taxonomies of
the world’s languages, and that this is due to similarities in the way humans perceive
the biological world in which they are perpetually immersed. Scott Atran [ 100 ] is
one of the strongest proponents of the theory that “universal taxonomic structures
universally constrain and guide inferences about the biological world”. Drawing on
evidence from the folk taxonomies of unrelated languages, and from psychological
experiments, Atran concludes that:
The uniform structure of taxonomic knowledge, under diverse sociocultural learning condi-
tions, arguably results from domain-specifi c cognitive processes that are panhuman,
although circumstances trigger and condition the stable structure acquired...
Although accounts of actual causal mechanisms and relations among taxa vary across
cultures, abstract taxonomic structure is universal and actual taxonomies are often recog-
nizably ancient and stable. This suggests that such taxonomies are products of an autono-
mous, natural classifi cation scheme of the human mind... Such taxonomies plausibly
represent “modular” habits of the mind, naturally selected to capture recurrent habits of the
world relevant to hominid survival in ancestral environments.
Such sentiments have repeatedly been voiced in the past in the context of many
different aspects of human language and cognition—the most prominent among
these is, of course, Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, which stresses the innate-
ness and universality of a set of grammatical rules, which are meant to reside in a
discrete module of the human mind. The notion of universals has met with consider-
able objection from fi eld linguists, who routinely fi nd, among their lesser-known
languages, counterexamples to the universalists’ homogenising claims (for a recent
review, see Evans and Levinson [ 101 ]). Even linguists who take the existence of
universals for granted now distinguish between ‘unrestricted’ universals (of the
form “All languages have X”) and ‘implicational’ universals (which are phrased as