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Folk Classification of Insects
Ethnobiological Classifications
‘To classify is human’, and many forms of classification are ubiquitous in all human societies. Indeed, practical classifying has been described as the ‘stuff of cultural anthropology – how people classify their everyday worlds, including everything from colour to kinship’ (Bowker and Star 1999: 59). But classification is not some detached, intellectual activity – which is how some anthropologists appear to define it (and then repudiate it!) – for, like all forms of knowledge, it is derived from our engagement with the natural world, from practical action, not passive contemplation, as scholars like Dewey (1929) and Roy (1940) taught us long ago. Classifying is therefore inherently both a practical activity and a social process.
Over the past two decades there have been a wealth of studies on ethnobiological classifications. Much of this material has, inevitably given their salience, focused on the larger vertebrates and the flowering plants, to the general neglect of fungi and insects. In a path-breaking work on the principles of categorization of plants and animals Brent Berlin (1992), for example, makes no mention of fungi, and only very briefly discusses insects. But what is of interest is that in listing the major ‘morphotypes’ of arthropods, Berlin refers to the principal insect orders and families, and not to biological genera and species, which are the levels of classification that are given prominence in his discussions of mammals and flowering plants (1992: 266-7). Equally interestingly, there is hardly any mention of African people in the whole text.
Ethnobiological classification is all about recognition and relating to the world: it constitutes one of the ways in which people organize their knowledge about plants, animals and fungi. It is focused on ‘natural kinds’ (in a holistic sense) – the basic kinds of living beings that make up the diversity of nature. To set up a dichotomy between ‘things’ (supposedly reflecting a Western logic) and ‘events’ (supposedly the preoccupation of tribal people), as do some anthropologists (cf. Bird-David 1999) is quite misleading, and an example of the exoticism that besets anthropology. Not only do events presuppose the existence of concrete ‘things’ (onta), living or otherwise, but to speak about the relationships and activities of organisms, such as insects or elephants, also presupposes their recognition as living entities. Moreover, to focus on the classification of natural kinds – organisms – as the fundamental units of life, with the properties of reproduction, growth, metabolism, autonomous agency and self-maintenance, and with natures specific to their own kind (Goodwin 1994), does not in the least entail, as Ingold (2000) seems to misleadingly infer, that a natural kind is therefore a distinct entity with no relationship to the surrounding world at all. Equally obfuscating therefore is the setting up of a dichotomy between ‘natural kinds’ – things – and relationships, as if these are antithetical perspectives. There are no relations without relata, and no relata without relations. As the social ecologist Murray Bookchin put it, in critiquing the spiritual mechanism of Capra and Bateson, who, as with Ingold and Nurit-Bird, seem to deny the world its very physicality: ‘The temptation to abandon the study of THINGS – living or not – for a study of relationships between them is as one-sided and reductionist as the temptation to abandon relationships for the things they interrelate.’ Such reductionism involves debasing concrete organisms into abstract relations and subjectivism. An organic way of thinking, which Bookchin advocates – and which people in Malawi also share, does not imply the repudiation of the reality of concrete things (Bookchin 1990: 156-7; Bunge 1996, 1999: 246).
It has long been recognized that organisms, as species-beings, reflect what Mayr describes as ‘real discontinuities in organic nature’ (1988: 331), which delimit the natural entities that are described by ethnobiologists as folk ‘generics’. Thus nobody perceives the world as ‘formless matter’ which is then, as cultural idealists would have it, (Leach 1964; Douglas 1990), culturally constructed in a unique and specific way by a particular ...
