Doctor Fomomindo's Preliminary Notes for a Future Index of Anthropomorphized Animal Behaviors

Note from the Editors: To help our readers understand why we have decided to include Doctor Fomomindo's admittedly unusual (and eternally unfinished) catalog (the FOMANCOG) as an appendix to this special issue of JFR, let us begin by asserting something we believe to be uncontroversial: Humans like to tell stories about things they are interested in, and the more these stories relate back to the human condition (imagined or otherwise) the more interested (most) humans will be in those stories.

When we first learned of the FOMANCOG's existence, we thought it would be little more than an interesting source of inspiration for future projects aimed at understanding parallels between the stories scientists tell about animals and those already well cataloged by folklorists. After dusting off the binder that contained Doctor Fomomindo's notes, however, the full scope of his ambitions became apparent. We realized his would-be catalog had far greater import than we could have ever suspected.

The Doctor's catalog and his introductory remarks speak for themselves. Nonetheless, we feel compelled to publicly acknowledge that our understanding of his project continues to evolve. This should not be surprising. It is, after all, a liminal project, straddling the emic/etic razor's edge on which Doctor Fomomindo has for so long danced. At this moment, we envision it as an attempt to lay bare the sources of cognitive folklore that motivate much of the scientific enterprise in which he spent decades as a participant. From this perspective, his efforts can be seen as reducing to the claim that because the scientists who study higher-order animal cognition are, themselves, fully enculturated humans, their methods, results, and conclusions can only be understood by mapping (aligning) their work to the folklore they know and/or have (sort of) forgotten.

A disclaimer: we do not (necessarily) endorse Fomomindo's methods or his mappings. Nor do we (as of yet) possess the requisite expertise to judge the merit of what we understand to be his claims. We are increasingly convinced, however, that his catalogical work could be the foundation for an important enterprise aimed at understanding the scope of motifs, tale types, aphorisms, parables, myths, and legends that encage the human animal cognition project. Doctor Fomomindo is acutely aware that his incomplete catalog, his partially filled pitcher, contains no more than a drop of water from the ocean of comparative psychology—a sea of empirical results that has been rising for a century and a half. Nonetheless, from the notes to his colleague, Doctor Folklomindo, that appear sporadically throughout the FOMANCOG, it is clear to us that it remains his unshakeable belief that a structural juxtaposition of the questions, methodological quagmires, and theoretical controversies in animal cognition alongside known folklore, might one day serve as a trail of bread crumbs leading us out of a very dark forest. (NB: We are aware that this Appendix will be seen in a very different light by those who have very recently begun to ponder the possibility of approaching the question of animal cognition through a folkloristic lens. This is understandable. And yet, any intelligent future discussions of "animal folklore" will necessitate that all interested parties become intimately familiar with [read: read] the science. If nothing else, Doctor Fomomindo's catalog could be a jumpstart in that direction.)

Finally, a note about format. Although we recognize the archaic tint of the old school Courier font, Doctor Fomomindo's laboratory had a standard operating procedure prescribing differing fonts for protocols, data sheets, and results summaries. We therefore have elected to reproduce the index, with no apologies, precisely as we found it.

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Notebook 1

A Future Index of Anthropomorphized Animal Behaviors and their Connection to Comparative Psychology

A dear colleague of mine, Doctor Folklomindo, recently introduced me to several catalogs that folklorists use to both empirically document and indexically categorize certain structural and thematic elements of the narrative body of work that Homo sapiens have produced. As I...