Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

534 Chapter 18
is over. The model postdicted (accounted for) 89% of the treatments that the
17 mothers had reported.
Next, Ryan and Martínez tested their model. They interviewed 20 more
mothers, but this time they asked each woman every question in the model. In
other words, they asked each woman: ‘‘In your child’s last episode of diarrhea,
did the stools have blood in them? Did the child have swollen glands? What
caused the diarrhea?’’ and so on. The IF-THEN model in figure 18.4
accounted for 84% of the second group’s treatment decisions.
Folk Taxonomies
There are about 6,000 languages spoken in the world today. Speakers of all
those languages name things in the natural world. In 1914, Henderson and
Harrington published a monograph on the ethnozoology of the Tewa Indians
of New Mexico. Scholars ever since have been interested in understanding the
variety of ways in which people organize their knowledge of the natural world.
In the 1950s, anthropologists began systematically producing folk taxonomies—that
is, hierarchical, taxonomic graphs to represent how people organize
their knowledge of plants and animals. These ethnobotanical and ethnozoological
taxonomies don’t necessarily mirror scientific taxonomies, but
then, the whole point of what became known as ethnoscience is to understand
cultural knowledge on its own terms.
Scientific taxonomies for plants and animals recognize six primary levels
of distinction (phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species) and lots of inbetween
levels, as well (infraorder, superorder, subclass, etc., etc.), but folk
taxonomies of plants and animals across the world are generally limited to five
or, at most, six levels. Figure 18.5 (from D’Andrade 1995) shows part of the
folk taxonomy of creatures for native speakers of English.
Covert Categories
There are six culturally appropriate levels of hierarchical distinction identified
in figure 18.5: (1) First, there is the unique beginner, a single label that
identifies the cultural domain. (2) Next comes a relatively small set of life
forms (animals, fish, insects, etc.). (3) Then there is an intermediate level,
which includes covert categories, if any exist in a particular taxonomy. Folk
genera (level 4), folk species (level 5), and folk varieties (level 6) round out
the picture.
There is a covert, unnamed category in figure 18.5 comprising wolves,
foxes, dogs, coyotes, and some other things (the dashed line extending down