ABSTRACT
Human attitudes to birds, animals, and reptiles in different societies have been described by certain anthropologists in connection with other theoretical objectives. For example, the central concern of the exemplary studies of Leach and Lévi-Strauss devoted to animal classification has not been with the attitudes of human cultures to natural species. Rather, these works are by and large primarily concerned with the logic of cultural classifications, and to identify the relevant categories some attention had to be paid to the conventional attitudes associated with those categories, in both myth and reality. For instance, the main concern of Leach’s (1964) study is animal categories and verbal abuse. Here Leach reveals the semantic relations between animal categories and their connections with kinship, edibility, taboo, and ritual.
