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Chapter Four Categorization in Cultural Perspective My brother seems to be getting to be quite a spokesman, even though he doesn’t live on the reservation and doesn’t know the traditional ways. I gave him a headdress to wear when speaking so people can see he’s a real Indian. —A Menominee elder SINCE WE’RE GOING to be talking about how two different groups think about nature, it seems like a good idea to place our work in the context of other work on cross-cultural similarities and differences in categorization of biological kinds. If you’re just interested in intergroup conflict over environmental resources, you might think we are straying a bit, but as we mentioned earlier, the intention of this book is to show that meanings matter. If meanings matter, the various components of understandings of the biological world, values, and practices are all interrelated and provide part of the story told in this book. In this chapter specifically we will take on the puzzle of categories—the building blocks of thought. Do people in different cultures organize nature in the same way? It is easy to be of two minds on this question. There’s a case for expecting large variation across cultures. First of all, there are clear examples of variation. For the Itza’ Maya of Guatemala, bats are birds. Other cultures do not consider the cassowary a bird. The traditional Menominee notion of “alive” includes materials such as water or rocks which are inanimate according to Western science and convention. Second, there’s no obvious reason why different peoples should have the same categories. One could argue that “similarity” is a universal organizing principle—that we put things in the same category because they are similar. If we think that similarity is an objective relation—that things 35 36 Culture and Resource Conflict seem similar if and only if they are similar—then we should expect cross-cultural agreement. But, as Nelson Goodman (1972) pointed out, similarity isn’t an objective relation. The number of shared aspects or features between two things depends on what is allowed to count as an aspect or feature and how much weight or importance is attached to each feature. Even if we restrict ourselves to perceptual features, assuming we can define what is and what isn’t a perceptual feature, we may be little better off—there is now fairly strong evidence from studies of perceptual learning that features themselves can change with experience (see Goldstone 1998). Instead, the perception of similarity may be the result of category learning, not the cause. Even if we delimit the features that we are considering, similarity will depend on how much weight is placed on the various features—a canary and a grapefruit belong to the same category if we only pay attention to color. Third, there is also good evidence that people’s concepts are organized in terms of their theories about the world (Carey 1985; Murphy and Medin 1985). In most cases these theories are framed in terms of causal principles and not in terms of similarity. A pair of siblings may be similar because they are twins but they are not twins because they are similar. The general line of argument from the theory view takes the form, if different theories lead to the formation of different categories and if the theories people have vary across cultures, then people in different cultures will have different categories. But the issue is not one-sided. First, if concepts are so different across cultures, why do we find it so natural to ask “What’s the name in your language for X?” where X usually is some object, including a plant or animal ? Suppose we point to a tree and ask for the name. When we’re given the name, we naturally and usually correctly assume that the word we are given corresponds more or less to the level of detail that we expect . It is not a superordinate label, such as “living kind,” that encompasses far more than the ash tree, nor will it be a highly specific or subordinate label, such as “Thompson’s seedless green ash,” that applies to just one narrow example of the plant or animal. Rather, the word we are given will be an intermediate, informative level of description such as “ash tree” or perhaps “tree.” A second and related counterargument is the way that things are in the world sets boundary conditions on...

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