HANUNO COLOR CATEGORIES:

ETHNOSCIENCE AND COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY

Report by Kim Tiangco

ETHNOSCIENCE
Ethnoscience was based on the critique of traditional fieldwork
To them, traditional ethnography was unscientific and that it
forced Western concepts on the classification of data.
Ethnoscientists attempt to reproduce cultural reality as it was
perceived and lived by members of the society in question.
Bronislaw Malinowski had written that the final goal of
ethnography was to grasp the natives point of view, his
relation to life, to realise his vision of his world

ETHNOSCIENCE
Because no one has direct access to another persons mind, the
cognitive principles and codes drawn by ethnographers were based
on what informants told them.
Thus the new ethnography drew heavily on the techniques of
linguistic analysis.
Jakobson and Troubetzkoy (Prague School of Linguistics) were
interested in the structure of languages, in particular, phonology.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - Both were interested in the relationship
between language and thought. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
postulated that language not only provided a means of
communication, but also shaped peoples perception of the world.

COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY

in the late 60s and early 70s, the focus of

ethnoscientific work shifted. Instead of simply
outlining native categories of thought,
anthropologists proposed that by analysing these,
one could learn how the human mind functioned.
They called this approach Cognitive Anthropology.

COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY

Cognitive anthropologists such as Stephen Tyler

conceptualised culture as a mental model and
consequently focused on the rules by which things
were categorised, rather than material culture.

HANUNO COLOR
CATEGORIES
This research attempts to show
how various ethnographic field
techniques may be combined
profitably in the study of lexical
sets relating to perceptual
categorization.
We will become are of problems
connected with understanding the
local system of color
categorisation because plant
determinations so often depend on
chromatic differences in the
appearance of flowers or
vegetative structures.

Color, in a western technical sense, is not a

universal concept and in many languages
such as Hanuno, there is no unitary
terminological equivalent.

Under laboratory conditions, color

discrimination is probably the same for all
human populations, irrespective of
language.

Color distinctions in Hanuno are made at two levels of contrast:

The first, higher, more general level consists of an all-inclusive,
coordinate, four-way classification which lies at the core of the color
system. The four categories are mutually exclusive in contrastive
contexts, but many overlap slightly in absolute.
The four Level 1 terms are:
(ma) biru relative darkness (of shade of colour); blackness
(black)
(ma) lagti relative lightness (or tint of colour); whiteness (white)
(ma) rara relative presence of red; redness (red)
(ma) latuy relative presence of light greenness; greenness
(green)

The Second Level, including several sub-levels,

consists of hundreds of specific colour categories.
Level 2 terms are of two kinds: relatively specific
color words like
(ma) dapug gray (dapug: hearth; ashes)
(ma) arum violet,
(ma) dilaw yellow (dilaw: turmeric)