34
- A subgeneric taxon is given a primary name if it is either the prototype of the
genus, or of major cultural importance. - Names commonly allude to characteristic traits of their referents.
Other Issues
- There is an ‘evolutionary sequence’ for the appearance of named taxa: generic
taxa are named fi rst, followed by higher order taxa, and fi nally subgeneric and
kingdom level taxa. The recognition of subgenerics is directly tied to plant
domestication.
Even a cursory scan of the above predictions reveals strong parallels with the
research efforts that sought to uncover linguistic universals in colour terminology.
The concept of prototypical categories, the emphasis on visual salience alone as the
driving force behind categorisation , and the ‘ evolution ’ of the domain-specifi c lexi-
con from simple to complex as a mirror of a culture’s level of technological devel-
opment are all ideas that have been discussed previously. Add to this the
methodological framework used in Berlin [ 9 ]—the near exclusive use of prepared
specimens as visual stimuli to be identifi ed, named and categorised by linguistic
consultants—and it becomes clear that the study of folk biological classifi cations
has been carried out with much the same assumptions that guided research into
colour classifi cation and body part terminology.
Two major lines of questioning can be followed at this point. (1) Can the general
principles listed above really be considered ethnobiological universals? Many, but not
all, of these principles are examined more fully in the following two chapters, in the
context of Solega naming and classifi catory practices relating to plants and birds. It will
be shown that the Solega data repeatedly fail to support many proposed ‘universals’ of
ethnobiological classifi cation and nomenclature. (2) Is it reasonable to expect the exis-
tence of ‘universals’ based on the arguments made in Berlin [ 9 ]? This question is
addressed in the current chapter, which investigates the theoretical foundations for the
claim that all human languages (along with scientifi c taxonomy) classify living things
in much the same way. In the following sections, I will argue that many of these basic
assumptions, as they relate to the Berlin model, are fl awed, as a result of which incorrect
conclusions have been reached about the nature of ethnobiological classifi cation.
2.3 On Challenging and Defending ‘Universals’
‘Universals’ are easy to posit, but hard to defend. Many absolute linguistic univer-
sals have been proposed, for which counterexamples can be found—often from
small, recently-described languages [ 101 ]. Evans and Levinson explain that less
than 10 % of the world’s living languages have adequate descriptions (a full gram-
mar and dictionary), and that making generalizations over such a small sample size
is a very risky business:
2 Ethnotaxonomies and Universals: Investigating some Key Assumptions