Constructing natures: symbolic ecology and social practice

Abstract

The results of this naturalistic prejudice have been clearly visible in the anthropological division of labour: while most ethnobiologists still confine their ambitions to studying the folk taxonomies andnomenclatures of 'naturally' existing living kinds, 'symbolic' anthropology has devoted its attention to elucidating the logic of native cosmologies which do not appear to classify their components in conformity with the rules of domain-specificity. According to the purported homogeneity or heterogeneity of their contents, classifications have thus been defined and treated in quite different ways, an extraordinary anomaly for a discipline which assumes the unity of humankind.