“Inhabitants of the Earth”: Reasoning About Folkbiological Concepts in Wichi Children and Adults

Across the world, people form folkbiological categories to capture their commonsense organization of the natural world. Structured in accordance with universal principles, folkbiological categories are also shaped by experience. Here we provide new evidence from the Wichi—an understudied indigenous community who live in the Chaco rainforest and speak their heritage language. A total of 44 Wichi (6to 8-year-olds, 9to 12-yearolds, adults) participated in an induction task designed to identify how broadly they attribute an invisible biological property (e.g., an internal organ) from 1 individual (either a human, nonhuman animal, or plant) to other humans, nonhuman animals, plants, natural kinds, and artifacts. Research Findings: These results (a) clarify the content of the Wichi’s categories and the words they use to describe them, (b) showcase the power of covert (unnamed) categories, and (c) fortify the view that human-centered reasoning is not a universal starting point for reasoning about nature. Practice or Policy: Implications of these findings for early science education are discussed. In particular, we discuss (a) how the Wichi’s construal of the natural world may be best integrated when they reach the (Western science–inspired) classroom and (b) how the current results bear on central issues in early science education more broadly. Humans make their homes in nearly every corner of the earth, in the deserts of Africa, the tundra of the arctic, the farms of the Great Plains, and in inner cities like Chicago and Beijing. Children raised in any one of these communities will be surrounded by objects and events that children raised elsewhere may never encounter. Yet despite these striking differences in experiences, there are strong similarities in how people represent their natural habitats. People from across the world’s communities form folkbiological categories. These folkbiological categories—a commonsense organization of the natural world—are structured in accordance with strong universal principles of hierarchical structure (Berlin, Breedlove, & Raven, 1973). More specifically, people across cultures tend to establish categories of objects that are nested within a hierarchical structure (e.g., TERRIER–DOG– ANIMAL). Moreover, within these structures, basic-level categories (those occupying an intermediate hierarchical position; e.g., DOG) have the strongest inductive force (Berlin et al., 1973; Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976). Indeed, Berlin (1992) described basic-level categories as “beacons on the landscape” that serve to help people “carve the natural world at its joints” (p. 26). Of course, the content of the categories people form (e.g., basic-level categories like jaguars and chaguar in the Chaco rainforest or squirrels and tulips in Chicago) also bear the indelible stamp of experience within their surroundings. CONTACT Andrea S. Taverna [email protected] Instituto de Investigaciones Lingüísticas, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad Nacional de Formosa (UNaF), Av. Gutnisky 3200, C.P. 3600, Formosa, Argentina. Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/HEED. © 2016 Taylor & Francis EARLY EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2016.1168228 D ow nl oa de d by [A nd re a Ta ve rn a] a t 1 1: 16 0 2 M ay 2 01 6 This interplay between cultural universals and cultural specifics, so apparent in the folkbiological systems people create, has served as fertile ground for clarifying which aspects of human development might be universal and how these are shaped by experience. Adopting a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic developmental approach, psychologists have asked how young children acquire fundamental biological concepts, including ANIMAL, PLANT, and LIVING THING. Three powerful shaping forces have been identified: language (e.g., whether and how key folkbiological categories are marked in the native language; Anggoro, Waxman, & Medin, 2008; Berlin et al., 1973; Leddon, Waxman, & Medin, 2008; Leddon, Waxman, Medin, Bang, & Washinawatok, 2012; Taverna, Waxman, Medin, Moscoloni, & Peralta, 2014; Waxman, 2005), forms of contact with the natural world (e.g., the kinds of interactions people have with the different kinds [e.g., artifact-rich vs. artifact-sparse] of environments; Atran et al., 2001; Tarlowski, 2006; Taverna et al., 2014; Winkler-Rhoades, Medin, Waxman, Woodring, & Ross, 2010), and culture (e.g., communitywide belief systems about the natural world; Astuti, Solomon, & Carey, 2004; Atran & Medin, 2008; Taverna, Waxman, Medin, & Peralta, 2012; Waxman, Medin, & Ross, 2007). Here we provide new evidence from another population—the Wichi, an understudied indigenous Amerindian group from a remote region of the Chaco forest (northern Argentina) who continue to speak their heritage language. Our work in this community is cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural at its core. Our team, which includes psychologists, linguists, and native members of the community, offers a rare opportunity to witness how folkbiological knowledge emerges in circumstances that differ rather dramatically from our own language, experiences of the natural world, and community-held belief systems. Perhaps more important, this work is also very timely. In 1984, the government of Argentina established an intercultural system of public schools aimed at providing the Wichi children with access to the Spanish language and to Western education in both the arts and sciences while preserving their cultural knowledge and native language (“Ley Argentina de Educación Nacional 26.206, 2006”). Unfortunately, however, curricular decisions have thus far been implemented by nonnative people (e.g., Zidarich, 2014). It is therefore important to identify what knowledge young Wichi children bring with them to their classrooms and to design curricula to augment this knowledge. In the current article, we focus on folkbiological knowledge among the Wichi, asking how children and adults reason about the relations among living things and how their language and belief systems shape their systems of reasoning. We consider three distinct age groups, tapping into the knowledge in young children (to identify what knowledge they bring with them as they begin their education at 6 to 8 years of age), in older children (to identify their knowledge after a few years of schooling at 9 to 12 years of age), and in adults with little formal schooling (to identify how adults in the community reason about the natural world). This work, designed to broaden the empirical base in order to specify the universal and culture-specific processes underlying conceptual development, also has pressing implications for early science education, not only within the Wichi community but for education more broadly. An Overview of The Wichi Community This work is part of a broader investigation examining folkbiological knowledge in this indigenous Amerindian community. Although the Wichi have been described in the linguistics and anthropology literatures (e.g., Nercesian, 2011; Palmer, 2005; Suárez & Montani, 2010; Terraza, 2009; Vidal & Nercesian, 2009), to the best of our knowledge ours is the first investigation to have adopted a cognitive and developmental approach (Taverna et al., 2012, 2014). In what follows, we describe in brief experiences in the natural world, Wichi beliefs, and the names the Wichi use to describe key folkbiological concepts.