Category construction

[Ilikekitties]

Hi all. My prof said that I need to have more of a theoretical basis for my research questions. My research comes down to the construction of categories/how people group things. I'm thinking Foucault. Others? I've read a little bit of The Order of Things.

[Ajtz'ihb]

Mary Douglas should be your point of departure, I think. Check out Purity and Danger.

There's also an excellent literature on categorizing and cognition in the subfield of ethnobiology, which looks at the way different peoples cognitively and linguistically organize the biological world. Google around for "ethnobiological nomenclature" and check out the work of Brent Berlin, Scott Atran, Douglas Medin, Eugene Hunn, Cecil Brown...those are just the people who've worked in Mesoamerica, which I know best.

Here's a good article to get you started: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00271.x/abstract

Edited October 7, 2015 by Ajtz'ihb

[Ilikekitties]

Thank you so much! Mary Douglas was mentioned by a faculty member. I may have read something by her in an anthology of anthro theory. I read it three years ago and I'm extremely rusty.