The Correspondence of Jivaroan to Scientific Ornithology

Previous studies offolk biological classification (Diamond 1966; Bulmer 1967, 1970; Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven 1973, 1974; Hunn 1975) have documented a strong correspondence between the ways folk and scientific systems of biological classification delineate natural discontinuities: folk and scientist alike recognize substantially the same categories ofplants and animals. These studies have used methods that assume that all native informants agree in their assignment of individual organisms to named classes. Unfortunately, this simplifying assumption is inaccurate; informants often disagree in their identifications of particular organisms. In this article we use data on the pattern ofinformant disagreement in specimen identification to establish a second type of correspondence between folk and scientific systems of biological classification: folk and scientist alike recognize substantially the same pattern of resemblance between organisms. Furthermore, variations in the strength of this second type ofcorrespondence are shown to reflect the evolutionary history of the organisms classified.