HOT AND COLD - CLASSIFICATION AND SORTING AMONG THE YUPNO OF PAPUA-NEW-GUINEA

The authors advocate a combination of ethnographic and psychological m ethods: Cognitive processes and the social distribution of knowledge a re to be studied not only through the collective representations deriv ed from interviews with key informants, but through behaviour observat ions in everyday settings, as well as specifically designed tasks, in order to observe problem solving more directly. The collaboration betw een an anthropologist and a psychologist is illustrated in a study of classification among the Yupno of Papua New Guinea. Their world-view c lassifies everything into three states: ''hot'', ''cold'', and ''cool' '. Only experts (sorcerers) can manipulate these states. After an ethn ographic description of this classification system, a sorting task was given to six samples of Yupno subjects. Only the sorcerers used the a bstract category of ''hot/cold'' explicitly; the other older adults us ed it implicitly through function, whereas schooling induced sorting b y colour. These findings call into question the anthropological and de velopmental status of classifying by taxonomy.