Brent Berlin

Overton Brent Berlin (born 1936) 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.

Berlin received a BA from the University of Oklahoma in 1959, and an MA from Stanford University in 1960.

He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1964.

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.

His Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1964 is in Anthropology.

Berlin is well known in the field of ethnobiology, or the study of how people name, use, and organize the names and the knowledge about the plants and animals around them.

He also further focused on Folk biology, a sub field of ethnobiology, which refers to the biological classification and reasoning particular to a cultural group.

Understanding societies’ interactions with their environment is vital to understanding the culture of the people.

Berlin’s contribution to the evolution of ethnobiology as a field has been invaluable to many anthropologists.

In 1968, Berlin, Breedlove and Raven studied the botanical ethnography of the Tzeltal Maya people of Chiapas, Mexico.

They published an article titled Covert Categories and Folk Taxonomy.

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.

Tzeltal is one of the Mayan languages spoken in Mexico, in which most linguists distinguish six different regional dialects.

In this study, they found many cultural and meaningful categories related by inclusion that are not conventionally labeled.

In their language, the different plants in each category all have a common word structure that puts them apart from all of the other plants.

They found that you cannot trace the words back to a single source where all plant names are included.

In most languages, they have a "unique beginner" that you can trace the names back to.

What Berlin and his colleagues found is that plants and animals are thought of as two separate unnamed classes.

In plant taxonomy, the highest level is not a "unique beginner" but is instead represented by four major lexemes or units.

These four levels are trees, vines, grasses, and herbs.

There are more minor classes that include cacti, agaves, bamboos, etc.

There are also very few midlevel plant categories.

All of the Tzeltal specific taxa (those that which include no other members) fall into the different major and minor sublevels in their taxonomy.

But, it is odd to note that the midlevel category hihte, or "oak", contains the plants sikyok and cikinib which neither share the same linguistic structure with their "parent plant."

To test the hypothesis they first went through the community, observed, and recorded information from their informants comments of the plants in their natural habitats.

When they went out into the field to collect data, they noticed that some of 10,000 specimens that were located in the same named contrast set were closely related than others.

They take into account the uses of the certain plants including food, herbs, firewood and so on.

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.

To do this, they wrote the names of different names of plants and animals on slips of papers and then gave them to their informants.

After doing this, the informants then put the slips of papers into groups that were most like each other.

The results showed that they had no trouble placing them in the different categories of "plants" and "animals."

This also showed that though they did not have a word for it they did know of the existence of "plants."

After this, they broke down the taxonomy even further by giving them different "plant" names and asking them the same question, as before they had no problem labeling each plant into the different groups or categories.

After they established that they understood the existence of subgroupings, they used three different procedures to find out how they define the features of certain plants.

His work alongside Paul Kay on the 1969 publication of Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution built on the ideas of Lazarus Geiger in the field of color terminology research and has been highly influential in anthropology, linguistics and cognitive sciences.

Berlin and Kay concluded that the number of basic color terms in the world's languages are limited and center on certain focal colors, assumed to be cognitively hardwired.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1981.

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."(1994)

He led the Maya ICGB project, a bioprospecting consortium, supported by the Biodiversity Program for the National Institutes of Health, which was closed in 2001 after accusations of failure to obtain adequate informed consent from the Maya community from which he obtained indigenous knowledge.

These allegations were primarily driven by a Canadian-based political activist organization, known at the time as RAFI.