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In his Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff tells about the Australian aboriginal tribe of the Dyirbal, who speak a language that classifies everything into four categories. One of these, "balan," includes "women, bandicoots, dogs, platypuses, echidnas, some fish, birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the hairy mary grub, anything connected with water or fire, sun and stars, shields, some spears, some trees" (the summary is from Walter Truett Anderson). The classification is based on analogies between women and each of these objects. The grub's, for instance, feels like sunburn, which puts it in the same group with the sun, conceived as feminine among the Dyirbal.
Western science seems to have a more objectively grounded system of classification, but even in modern science there are oddities and anomalies. Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that biological classification systems are either "pheneticist" (based on similarity of form, function, etc) and "cladist" (based on evolutionary genealogy. The former classify all three types of zebra in one group, but the latter consider the mountain zebra to be from a distinct ancestry.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 08, 2006 at 05:00 PM
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