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.