ABSTRACT
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. Ethnobiologists have postulated that folk-biological classifications typically relate to five taxonomic levels; yet those that seem to have particular salience for Aristotle, and for many ethnobiologists, are the taxonomic ranks, life-form and generics. The taxonomic levels include: ‘bird’, ‘fish’, ‘tree’, ‘herb’ and ‘quadruped’. Folk generics as natural kinds tended to be perceived as a gestalt, as a configurational, dynamic unity, rather than as an entity with a discrete list of properties – though people everywhere described generics with reference to certain key attributes. The folk generics of the Tzeltal seem roughly to correspond to biological families, only a few being identified at the species level, while the ‘covert complexes’ that Hunn delineates relate mainly to insect orders.
