Overton Brent Berlin (born 1936)[1] is an American anthropologist, most noted for his work with linguist Paul Kay on color, and his ethnobiological research among the Maya of Chiapas, Mexico.
Until recently, Berlin was Graham Perdue Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, where he was also director of the center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and co-director for the Laboratories of Ethnobiology.
Considering "a series of landmark publications concerning ethnobiological classification, Berlin has remained a prime architect of the descriptive and analytic frameworks now widely regarded as standard and major theory.
[6] They found a way to determine, with a high degree of reliability, the major outlines of the named taxonomic structure of the plant world for Tzeltal speakers.
A second method that was used helped with searching for possible subgroupings within contrast sets of large numbers was to determine the extent to which informants subdivided lists of plant names.
One of the first works Berlin published in relation to the budding field of ethnobiology was also one of his more influential: General Principles of Classification and Nomenclature in Folk Biology (1973)[7] was coauthored with Dennis Breedlove of the California Academy of Sciences and Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Garden.
In this journal article, Berlin and team intended to illustrate three hypotheses they felt were properly supported by the data they had acquired during the research they completed.
They continued to describe how these organisms, flora or fauna, belonging to each of these categories can be arranged into a complex taxonomic hierarchy.
They turned their attentions to the formal linguistic structure of the lexemic nomenclature of the plants and animals and to which taxa each of these organisms belong to.
The data they had obtained studying the Tzeltal and the lexemic system used to name plants was found to conform, with only a few exceptions, to the hypotheses Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven had laid out.
Finally, they attempt to show how the principles demonstrated by the research suggest they can be applied to many ethnobiological classification systems since they are general.
"While data on some aspects of ethnobotany and ethnozoology, especially the uses of plants and animals, are available from a wide variety of sources, good materials on the classificatory principles underlying folk biological taxonomy and nomenclature in non-Western societies are sadly lacking (1973).
Berlin, Breedlove and Raven began to encourage and emphasize the importance in gaining ethnobiological information regarding nomenclature and utilizing the principles they laid out to increase our knowledge of potentially general cognitive categorizing, the people who use these taxonomic systems, and how these systems can influence our view of the environment around us.
In a following article published in the American Ethnologist (1976),[8] Berlin attempted to address some criticisms he had encountered regarding the ethnobiological concept of category, hereafter also referred to as rank, by applying some of his previous principles to new information on biological classification of the Aguaruna.
The conclusion of the report stated, "[…] the vast majority of conceptually recognized plant classes in Aguaruna are easily accommodated into one of the proposed ranks in a natural and straightforward fashion.
On the contrary, the Aguaruna’s view of the plant world provides additional support for the hypothesis that the concept of rank is fundamental to all systems of folk biological classification" (1976).
The absence of any life-form classes for some animals, such as bats, pythons, pigs, and dogs ("unaffiliated generics" [Berlin 1992:171-181]) also complies with this interpretation.
"[9] Similarly, a more recent study concluded that "a more careful analysis does leave aside the idea that perhaps these findings [a ranked, neatly hierarchy of folk taxa] are merely artifacts of the collection procedure or the interpretation of data, which forces an adaptation of the findings to the principles formulated by Berlin"[10] Some recent studies still use folk taxonomic ranks, but these highlight some problems.
[15] In this book, Berlin analyzes the widespread commonalities in classification and naming purposes of the local flora and fauna among traditional, non-literate societies.
He brings up an interesting suggestion that ethnobiological nomenclature is not necessarily arbitrary, but often reflects some aspect of the inherent quality of the organism.
"Brent Berlin maintains that these patterns can best be explained by the similarity of human beings' largely unconscious appreciation of the natural affinities among groupings of plants and animals: people recognize and name a grouping of organisms quite independently of its actual or potential usefulness or symbolic significance in human society" (2009).
This claim challenged some anthropologists’ beliefs that one's sense of reality is determined by culture; that the subjective and unique view one has of their surroundings is controlled little by the world around the individual.
In reference to the book, Terence Hays says, "Here, Berlin deals straightforwardly and systematically with his major critics, acknowledging that ‘the patterns recognized nearly two decades ago must now be restated in light of new evidence and new theoretical insights that have emerged since that time’" (1994:3)[citation needed].
In 1996, in collaboration with his wife, Elois Ann Berlin, he published a book entitled Medical Ethnobiology of the Highland Maya of Chiapas, Mexico: The Gastrointestinal Diseases.
"(2008)[17] Brent Berlin has generated information and new techniques of analyzing data that has influenced many well established members of the field and up and coming students who strive to be an asset to the social sciences.
Instead of depending solely on the painted chips like they did in the previous experiment, they "began presenting items of natural or artificial object and asking...’what stain does it have’, a question provided us by a bilingual teacher"(1975).
The NGO PROMAYA was established as a foundation through which the project could share rights and benefits with the indigenous holders of the medicinal knowledge.
Soon after being initiated the project became the subject of harsh criticisms by indigenous activists and Mexican intellectuals who questioned how knowledge obtained from individual Maya could be patented by researchers or foreign pharmaceutical companies, how the PROMAYA NGO established by the Berlins and under their control could be considered representative of the many different Maya communities in Chiapas, and how it was possible for the knowledge that had been collective property of the Maya peoples to become suddenly privatized without the prior consent of each of the individual initial holders of the knowledge.
[22] The Maya ICBG case was among the first to draw attention to the problems of distinguishing between bioprospecting and biopiracy, and to the difficulties of securing community participation and prior informed consent for bioprospectors.