Animals of the forest (tshotoy): Universal folkbiological concepts are shaped by culture and experience

BAIOCCHI, MARÍA CELESTE; TAVERNA, ANDREA SABINA; WAXMAN, SANDRA

Austin (Texas)

Encuentro; 2017 SRCD Biennal Meeting; 2017

Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD)

People across the world?s communities form well-structured and inductively rich categories of entities in the natural world (e.g., animal). These categories, which are structured in accordance with strong universal principles (e.g. hierarchies, Berlin et al., 1973; Atran, 1998), are also shaped markedly by peoples? experience in the natural world. People living in urban and suburban communities, with relatively little direct engagement with nature, tend to focus especially on taxonomic groupings. But people living in agrarian or rural communities, with extensive direct contact with nature, focus on both taxonomic and ecological relations (e.g., food chains) ( e.g., López et al., 1997; Bailenson et al., 2002). Here, we extend this line of work to examine the conceptual organization of the concept ?animal? among the Wichi, an indigenous group of Amerindians who live in the Chaco forest (northern Argentina). The Wichi speak their own native language and endorse a constellation of beliefs about the natural world that differ importantly from those in Western culture, including a tripartite classification within the animal kingdom (?animals of the forest? (tshotoy), ?animals of the air? (tshotoy fwiy?ohen), ?animals of the water? (tshotoy inot lheley), ?domestic animals? (laloy) that cuts across taxonomic groupings (Taverna et al., 2012). Adopting a developmental, crosscultural perspective, we ask how adults and children from this relatively under-studied population represent the largest and most diverse of these, the ?animals of the forest? (tshotoy). First, in a sorting task patterned after López et al. (1997), we examine 15 Wichi adults? groupings of local forest animals. The results reveal that adults endorse two distinct cultural consensus models: An intricate ecological-based model which reflects relations among animals (e.g., dangerous predators, animals that do not compete each other for food or habitat; animals that are eaten by humans; animals that share the same habitat) and a similarity-based model in which animals are organized on the basis of morphological features (e.g., animals that have carapace; small animals). Armed with evidence from the adult model, we then designed a simplified version of this task to examine 30 Wichi-speaking children (15 young (5 to 6 years, just beginning formal science education) and 15 older (10 to 11 years, well along in formal science education). Data analysis, currently underway, will pinpoint when children show evidence of the ecological and taxonomic models of the ?animals of the forest?. We suspect that even the youngest children will appreciate the ecological model, and that this model may prevail for the older children who, despite their years of formal schooling, are immersed in community-wide belief systems and activities, and in direct engagement with nature. This work underscores the power of identifying: a) potential universals in peoples? organization of the natural world and b) how these universals interact with the cultural forces, across development, within and across different cultures.