Ethnoscience Taxonomy
Ethnoscience taxonomy is the ethnoscientific, or 'new ethnography,' approach to recovering how a culture classifies its world by eliciting the native terms of a domain and the inclusion and contrast relations that link them. Through structured interview questions — especially 'Is X a kind of Y?' and 'What kinds of Y are there?' — the researcher discovers which categories nest under which and which categories stand opposed at the same level. Organizing these relations produces a folk-taxonomic tree: a hierarchy of native categories built from the informants' own words rather than from scientific classification imposed from outside.
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Sources
- Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN: 9780030444968
- Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Ethnoscientific Folk-Taxonomy Elicitation. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/anthropology/ethnoscience-taxonomy
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
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