Brent Berlin - Works in Ethnobiology

Works in Ethnobiology

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 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. 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)