We are all flowering: Naming of plants among the Tzotzil Maya of Zinacantán; a cultural account of difference.

In: Ahn, et al. (eds.). Categorization inside and outside the classroom. APA monograph.

This paper present data from the Tzotzil maya community of Zinacantan, Chiapas. The data are based on a freelisting experiment, during which approx. 130 adults were asked to name all the trees (te’) they can think of. This task was applied to test for effects of cultural change with respect to the saliency of folkbiological knowledge. Recent changes in the community affected men more than women, in the sense that men increasingly looked for alternative sources of income, abandoning the work in the milpa, the traditional agricultural field. While men are therefore less exposed to their immediate natural environment, women still go out gather firewood, herbal plants and tend to smaller life-stock.

Therefore it was hypothesized that:

(1) Trees should be more salient for women than for men.

(2) Different kinds of trees (based of activities) should be mentioned by men and by women.

(3) Given that the situation hasn’t changed that much for women, we should not expect to find age differences among women with respect to the saliency of tree species.

(4) In comparison to (3) we should find age differences among men, as younger men are probably more affected by those changes and because older men probably can still recall “better times.”

The data from the freelisting task confirmed all these hypotheses, clearly linking social processes to processes in the cognition.