Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
We cannot think about the world unless we assign it to categories. Categories also help us act upon the world, but are probably not essential to all kinds of activity. It is a matter for debate whether categories for thinking and for acting differ.
The discussion which follows concerns classifications as objects of intellectual scrutiny (for the most part, folk classifications), rather than the classifications which anthropologists use to order their data, though these latter are ultimately subject to the same generalizations.
‘Classification’ is that activity in which objects, concepts and relations are assigned to categories; ‘classifying’ refers to the cognitive and cultural mechanisms by which this is achieved; and ‘classifications’ are the linguistic, mental, and other cultural representations which result. Problems arise when the adjectival and nominal status of the root ‘class’ are conflated. This reifies schemes as permanent cultural artefacts or mentally-stored old knowledge, when they are more properly understood as the spontaneous and often transient end-product of underlying processes in an individual classifying act. We might call such a misinterpretation ‘the classificatory fallacy’, and there is every reason to believe that it is potentially evident whenever ethnographers try to make sense of their data, whether these be tables of symbolic oppositions, animal taxonomies or *relationship terminologies.
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