ABSTRACT
Languages categorize the world. This might seem a straightforward statement, but it is not. Languages do provide people with ready-made ways of talking about or dealing with reality, but in doing so they also create their own reality and afford practitioners ways in which to alter that reality by a changed arrangement of categories. The authors explore shared comparative themes about cassowaries in an expanded arena of the cultures of Eastern Indonesia as well as the whole island of New Guinea. Ellen alerts us to the likelihood that a taxonomic kind of theory and methodology may induce in its proponents an inordinate value in finding taxonomic structures. Given all these considerations, Roy Ellen suggests that instead of speaking of cognition or perception we can identify the mode of “classifying” that people employ as prehension, meaning the total embodied processes by means of which they relate to the world around them.
