Symbolic Lizards: Forms of Special Purpose Classification of Animals among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Nage people of Flores island, eastern Indonesia, recognize an unnamed (or “covert”) life-form category comprising several named kinds of lizards as a distinct component of their folk zoological taxonomy, a general purpose classification of animals based primarily on universally observable morphological and behavioral features. Exploring symbolic values of lizards evidenced in Nage thought and practice, this essay considers how far lizards might also compose a unitary symbolic class and whether symbolic similarity and contrast may inform Nage taxonomy. The answer is in both cases negative. Typically, symbolic classes cross-cut the major divisions of a folk taxonomy of animals, thereby associating, on symbolic grounds (such as common association with spiritual beings), animals belonging to diverse life-forms such as snakes, birds, and fish. With reference to this and other findings, exploration of Nage lizard classification serves to introduce a discussion of general differences between folk taxonomy and symbolic classification of animals as well as circumstances in which folk taxonomic and symbolic categories are likely to coincide. Attention is also given to utilitarian categories as another form of special purpose, non-taxonomic classification, and with reference to specific practical uses Nage make of lizards, it is shown how the various members of the Nage folk taxon “lizard” similarly do not compose a single class. Contradicting a time-honored view most closely associated with Mary Douglas, the essay thus provides a comprehensive, critical demonstration of how animal classification in a given society need not compose a conceptual unity.