The Cultural Relations of Classification: An Analysis of Nuaulu Animal Categories from Central Seram (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 91)

Ethnobiology is concerned with the social and cultural transformation of biological knowledge. Roy Ellen, who has worked among the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia for more than twenty years, argues here that ethnobiology is a key theoretical area of anthropological enquiry, because it relies on accessible ethnography to explain the interrelationship between collective representations and cognitive processes. He demonstrates this through a detailed analysis of Nuaulu classification of animal knowledge: the relationship between animal words and animal categories; the construction of different categories and their relationship to one another, and the actual language of classification. The classifications are shown to be context-bound and socially embedded, of practical importance to their users, and to reflect an interaction between culture, cognitive processes and the material world. This is an innovative study, which takes our understanding beyond the taxonomic abstraction characteristic of earlier work in the field. Ethnobiology is concerned with the social and cultural transformation of biological knowledge. Roy Ellen, who has worked among the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia for more than twenty years, argues here that ethnobiology is a key theoretical area of anthropological inquiry, because it relies on accessible ethnography to explain the interrelationship between collective representations and cognitive processes. He demonstrates this through a detailed analysis of Nuaulu classification of animal knowledge: the relationship between animal words and animal categories; the construction of different categories and their relationship to one another, and the actual language of classification. The classifications are shown to be context bound and socially embedded, of practical importance to their users, and to reflect an interaction between culture, cognitive processes, and the material world. This is an innovative study which takes our understanding far beyond the taxonomic abstraction characteristic of earlier work in the field. Roy Ellen has studied the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia for more than twenty years. He is a major figure in ethnobiology, the branch of anthropology that examines the social and cultural transformation of biological knowledge. The present study looks at the Nuaulu classificatory system of animal knowledge: the relationship between animal words and animal categories, how these categories are constructed, and the language of classification. The author relies on rich and fascinating data to show that all classifications reflect an interaction among culture, cognitive processes, and the material world. An innovative study of the Nuaulu classificatory system of animal knowledge. It demonstrates how the classification system reflects an interaction between culture, cognitive processes and the material world.

This is an innovative study, which takes our understanding beyond the taxonomic abstraction characteristic of earlier work in the field.

I first undertook fieldwork among the Nuaulu of south central Seram between 1969 and 1971.