Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Serious study of classification, February 10, 2009
This review is from: The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) (Hardcover)
This is an excellent, accessible summary of the thorough and extremely important research done by Scott Atran, Douglas Medin, and their associates over the last many years. They have studied the ways people classify things, and have compared the Anglo-Americans of the Midwestern US with the Menomini people of Wisconsin and the Itza' Maya of Guatemala. Of course, the Menomini and Itza' know more about local plants and animals than urban Americans do, but even in comparison with outdoor and rural Americans there are key differences: the indigenous people have a more religious or spiritual association with nonhuman lives, a deeper sense of ecological relationships, and a more comprehensive view of how humans can and do interact with those other lives.
Nonanthropologists will probably be astonished at the depth and sophistication of Menomini and Maya knowledge of ecology, and at the similarity of their categories of plants and animals to those of modern international science. People do recognize natural relationships, though classification is also influenced by utility and culture. The book's discussion of this is state-of-the-art, and advances our understanding of it. The finding is devastating to those who think classification is purely a cultural construction without feedback from reality. Yes, classifications are culturally constructed, but cultures construct knowledge for use, not to play head games, and the more a classification is culturally constructed, the better it balances biological fact and human use-values. A culture that classified strychnine as perfect food would not last long.
This book pleads for more attention to teaching children (by implication, especially modern urban children) much more about the nonhuman world, and doing it by actual exposure and immersion and interaction, as the indigenous cultures do, rather than by memorizing stray facts for a standardized test.
Notable in this book is the clear English, and the well-told, circumstantial stories of field work and experience. This will make the book far more useful to the many teachers, nature lovers, and environmental scientists who will profit greatly from reading it. What a contrast with the dismal postmodern books I've been reading lately (many call themselves "political ecology")--they are just the reverse, hiding banal and obvious truths under a squid-ink cloud of ridiculous pseudointellectual jargon.
My one feeble complaint about the present book is about usage. "Folkbiology" bothers me; the Menomini and Itza' systems are the full scientific systems of those cultures, not comparable to the "folk" as opposed to "sophisticated" or "educated" systems of the Anglo-Americans. "Folk," to me, has a bit of an edge, as in "folk music" vs Mozart. Also the authors follow a dubious trend of respelling Yucatec as "Yukatek" when referring to the people called in English the "Yucatec Maya." Yucatec is a Spanish word, not an indigenous one, and the Maya don't use it about themselves (they use "yucateco/a" to refer to anyone from the Yucatan Peninsula, whether Maya or not). Respelling Spanish is no fair.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The importance of specific information and experience, December 17, 2008
This review is from: The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) (Hardcover)
In the pursuit of studying ourselves or teaching others about complex ecological systems, there seems to be two major assumptions that block our way. First is that the we can use general principles to understand almost all systems and that this deductive learning is actually preferred. Second is that we can teach and apply critical thinking skills that are independent of the content. This book by Atran and Medin provides some valuable insights and counter-arguments to work around these blockages.
The authors are worried about the loss of interaction with the details of nature is resulting in a loss of mental capacity to perform reasoning and induction about the natural world. Others have called this "extinction of experience" or "nature-deficit disorder". The authors provide evidence from a range of studies that involve resident populations with different levels of experience with nature (for example in Mexico or in Minnesota). These study populations are always compared back to freshman and sophomores at major universities, who serve as a control group.
The authors believe that "people who have serious commerce in a domain rarely approach it in a content neutral manner" and they back this up with many examples of expert problem solving that relies on very specific facts and relationships within that domain. I found their use of American undergraduates to very illuminating. They state "Undergraduates, in contrast, have little knowledge to bring to bear on the sorts of reasoning tasks we have used and consequently it is not surprising that they rely heavily on more abstract reasoning strategies", and later "The best predictor of undergraduate typicality ratings was word frequency" in the textbook.
Another section of the book that I found very useful was their investigation of the difference between three co-located cultures with regard to the problem that we call the "tragedy of the commons". Specific indigenous knowledge, folk-ecology, of the Itza' resulted in them using much less land and reaching a "better balance between human productivity and forest maintenance" than either of the other two groups who had moved into that region. The authors reason that the Itza' are aware of ecological complexity and reciprocity and "might not treat resources as traditional decision and game theory suggests" and behave in a way that appears "irrational" to economists.
This book is built on rigorous studies of the culture and social interactions with the natural world. The authors are very clear about the results of their study and when they are extrapolating or giving their interpretation of the results. The subject of their studies, plant and animal taxonomy, is familiar enough to most people to be able to follow the different lines of reasoning.
I enjoyed reading this book and find myself both referring back to the book and using the results of their studies in discussions all the time.
Other related works that I recommend are:
Louv, R. (2005). Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Chapel Hill, NC, Algonquin Books. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder
Reed, E. S. (1996). The Necessity of Experience. New Haven, Conn, Yale University Press. The Necessity of Experience
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mainly for an academic audience, March 20, 2011
I purchased this book because I was interested in the ideas. Although it is packaged as a popular book, it is really written for an academic audience. The writing is very 'stiff' and full of jargon and details that were beyond my interest in the subject.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
