Chapter Summary

Human societies need to find order in, and make sense of, the environments in which they live. Cultural systems, therefore, translate objective reality into categories that have meaning to them. We call these categories folk taxonomies.

So important are the relationships between the sexes and the relative places in society of males and females that different cultural systems have evolved very different folk taxonomies for sex. These are gender roles and identities and, in some societies, they may even compromise more than two genders if those societies formally classify persons of ambiguous sex or sexuality.

That humans in general display variable traits is obvious, on some level, to all societies, and so all cultural systems also include folk taxonomies for race. On a biological level, however, races or subspecies do not exist for our species. Indeed, the concept of race is falling from use in biology in general. But even if we attempt to apply the race concept to humans, we find that the biological nature of our species does not lend itself to division into clear-cut, discrete units.

So powerful is the folk taxonomy for race that our categories take on a reality beyond that which is warranted, and we find that we use them as cues to tell us how to think about other groups of people and how to treat them. We can all too easily confuse culture and biology, and this effect can even be seen in scientific investigations, such as those that look for some biological racial difference in the cultural measure of intelligence called IQ.

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