44
It is certainly not hard to fi nd counterexamples to Berlin ’s claim in scientifi c
taxonomy: potato, tomato, eggplant and nightshade are all scientifi c species under
the genus Solanum , while dog, jackal, wolf, and coyote are all species of Canis —do
English speakers really need “deliberate and conscious effort” to tell these organ-
isms apart? Moreover, is a stoat ( Mustela erminea ) “almost instantaneously” distin-
guishable from a pine marten ( Martes martes ), but more easily confused with a
polecat ( Mustela putorius ), simply because the latter is the same genus? I do not
think Berlin’s claim holds for folk taxonomies either—there is no compelling evi-
dence from folk taxonomies that adult native speakers fi nd it harder to distinguish
“folk species” within a folk genus than to distinguish folk genera from each other.
The only people in a community that this could be said of with some certainty
would be young children and visiting ethnobiologists. In my experience, adults have
provided me with erroneous subgeneric names as often as they have erroneous
generic labels (see discussion on [ 140 ] below). Berlin’s enthusiasm for Cain’s work
is also puzzling, given the latter’s thoughts on the reality of the biological genus:
A review of the interrelationships of different sorts of species and the evolutionary tree
shows that the genus cannot now be regarded as a naturally discrete group either in relation
to its ancestors and descendants, or at any one time. It is not necessarily defi nable by one
single peculiar attribute, nor are its constituents monotypic, equivalent, essentially merely
subdivisions of it, or themselves wholly discrete. It is monophyletic, but purely positional in
rank, and a collection of phyletic lines, not an entity subdivisible into species. ([ 139 ], p. 108)
In addition to assuming that folk generics are universally more salient, both
within and across languages, Berlin draws an explicit connection between folk and
scientifi c taxa at this level of classifi cation.
For the higher vascular plants and larger vertebrate animals, generic taxa often approximate
in their content the genera and species of Western scientifi c biology ([ 9 ], p. 25).
Ethnobiologists will readily agree that in all systems of ethnobiological classifi cation one can
discover named groupings of plants and animals that represent Bartlett’s “smallest groupings
requiring a distinctive name” or, in Cain’s rephrasing of Bartlett, “the smallest ‘kind[s]’ of
plants and animals that can be recognised without close study.” These fundamental taxa cor-
respond... to taxa known as ‘genera’ in modern biological systematics ([ 9 ], p. 64)
However, Berlin is careful to note that the match between scientifi c and folk
categories is not perfect:
...folk genera do not in most cases correspond perfectly with taxa recognised as genera in the
Western scientifi c system. Furthermore, subgeneric taxa... also do not generally correspond
in a perfectly predictable way with taxa recognized as ‘species’ in Western taxonomy (p. 64).
While the last three statements sound somewhat contradictory, let us assume for
the moment, that Berlin ’s position can be summed up as follows: For some groups
of organisms, in particular higher vascular plants and large vertebrates, there is a
good, but not perfect, correspondence between folk genera on the one hand, and
biological genera on the other. Unfortunately, several counterexamples can be
found even with this rather generous reading of Berlin’s prediction—for many
prominent, named groups of plants and animals, the correspondence between folk
2 Ethnotaxonomies and Universals: Investigating some Key Assumptions