36
One of the key proposals of the Berlin model is that ethnobiological classifi cation s
worldwide share broad, predictable similarities, and that such classifi cations are, in
turn, surprisingly close to those produced by professional scientifi c taxonomists. Such
a concordance, Berlin claims, cannot be coincidental, and must therefore be the result
of shared, innate properties of human cognition—scientists and non-scientists alike
perceive the living world in a very particular way, and this results in very similar clas-
sifi cation schemes. As preliminary evidence for this claim, Berlin discusses the results
of the impromptu demonstration experiments he regularly holds in his undergraduate
classes. A student with no biological training is called to the front of the class, and
shown a pile of museum specimens of birds from Berlin’s fi eld site. He is then asked
to arrange them in whatever way he deems appropriate.
The student’s efforts always result in a series of neatly stacked groups of individual birds,
usually lined up in a row. The piles correspond perfectly to the groupings recognised by
scientifi c ornithologists, as well as to those of the Huambisa and Aguaruna Jivaro from
whom the specimens were collected ... This informal exercise ... points out several facts
about how humans discern the natural clusters and clumps of biological reality—clusters
that are perceivable, one might say, from distinct perspectives , or with different degrees of
resolution. (p. 10)
To the extent that the Western scientist and the native ethnozoologist see the same organ-
isms , and to the extent that, without prior discussion of the local system of classifi cation, the
former’s classifi cation of the local fauna turns out to correspond closely to the latter’s as
regards which species are singled out for naming, then one may reasonably infer that in both
systems grouping is based on the recognition of relative degrees of similarity and difference
among species. Since the two naturalists are classifying exactly the same animals, the tax-
onomy of the Western scientist should be nearly identical to that of our indigenous ethnozo-
ologist. (p. 82)
While the results described by Berlin are, at fi rst glance, compelling, they are
based on two critical assumptions which are at least highly contentious, if not deeply
fl awed. The fi rst is that there is a single “natural order” of plants and animals that it
is possible to discover through objective, scientifi c means. The second is that the
work of (mainly European) taxonomists over the last two centuries has indeed been
objective, and has resulted in truly natural groupings that adequately capture “ the
natural clusters and clumps of biological reality ”.
Since, in any local habitat, biological reality is not a continuum but a series of readily defi n-
able chunks that can be described in terms of the objective methods of biological fi eld botany
and zoology, one is motivated to discover what portions of this reality are cognitively recog-
nised in any particular folk biological system and why. (p. 13)
Taken together, these assumptions give the distinct impression that the practice of
taxonomy (in the western scientifi c sense) involves the simple collection of objective
natural facts, and the subsequent arrangement of these facts to produce a single clas-
sifi cation scheme that not only refl ects biological truisms (and therefore does not
change with time—at least within a human lifespan), but also has the consensus of
all taxonomists. In the following sections, I will briefl y discuss the objections that
many researchers have raised about these assumptions.
2 Ethnotaxonomies and Universals: Investigating some Key Assumptions