Anthropology, Taxonomies, and Publishing

摘要

Aanthropologists are exceptional taxonomists: They classify not butterflies or minerals, but human cultures. To do this, they need to identity and understand the concepts people use to order their world, observe how those concepts are used in daily life, and make logical lists of the words that symbolize those concepts. The task requires both description and comparison. Description is important in order to identify the concepts that are meaningful to the people in question and not substitute for those the concepts that are meaningful to you. For example, the average American calls most forms of rice simply "rice," and when making distinctions among different types of rice, it is usually done on the basis of length (long-or short-grained) and color (brown or white). But in a rice-growing village in Indonesia, people may have no single word that is the equivalent of our "rice."