Try Tim Valentine's The Cognitive Psychology of Proper Names. What may
really help you, however, is looking at the ethnographic literature
about cross-cultural relationships in classificatory systems. When I was
doing some writing about natural kind terms a while back I especially
found Brent Berlin's Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of
Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies and Cecil
Brown's Brown Language and Living Things: Uniformities in Folk
Classification and Naming useful. Some very interesting stuff in this
literature. For example, there seems to be a good deal of cross-cultural
agreement about plant classifications on the level of genera (which is
said to involve relatively visual criteria) but much less so at higher
or lower levels. Outside of scientific contexts it seems questionable
that the West has any special propensity to name. Within scientific
contexts having names for the things you are studying seems to be pretty
useful and I don't see why it would be considered to be so awful.
In terms of film, the classic expression of this sort of thing comes out
at the beginning of Stan Brakhage's Metaphor on Vision:
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye
unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to
the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in
life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a
field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many
rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations
in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with
incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of
movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the
'beginning was the word.'
j
Magnus Danerek wrote:
>I am writing a paper on why it is so important to give something a name. In the western world there is a kind of obsession to cathegorize, put a name on things, occupy, talk about everything. The west moistens everything with meaning like an authoritan religion imposing baptism on entire people as Roland Barthes said.
>
>Could anyone recommend some littarure on this perhaps?
>
>thanks,
>
>Magnus Danerek(Student, Master progam in Cultural Studies at Lunds University Sweden)
>
>
>
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