Modes of identification broadly schematize our experience of things, distinguishing between parcels of ontological properties distributed in accordance with the arrangements of existing beings, arrangements whose structural characteristics we have examined above, each in turn. It is a distribution of beings according to their attributes, the principles according to which socio-cosmological collectives are organized, the dominant regimes of knowledge and action, and the boundaries of identity and otherness. Each of these forms of identification defines a specific style of relations with the world. Long-established expressions of these relations are to be found in geographical regions, many of which are immense, and over very long periods. Yet we cannot use those styles as criteria for distinguishing between singular collectives with contours limited both in time and in space—the kind that historians, ethnologists and sociologists usually choose to investigate. Rather, we should regard those stylizations of experience as what are usually called ―world views,‖ ―cosmologies‖ or ―symbolic forms,‖ all of these being terms of vague epistemological status yet that constitute a handy intuitive way of synthesizing under a simple label (such as ―the modern West,‖ or ―shamanistic societies‖), ―families‖ of practices and mind-sets that seem to display affinities despite the diversity of their concrete manifestations. However, within those great archipelagos marked out by a shared mode of identification one comes across numerous kinds of collectives that consider themselves to be very different from one another (and that are, indeed, perceived as different by those who study them). This is not only on account of their different languages, institutions and, more often than not, the