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| Pt. 1 | Plan | |
| Ch. 1 | On the Making of a Comparative Ethnobiology | 3 |
| 1.1 | Intellectualist and Utilitarian Approaches in Ethnobiology | 3 |
| 1.2 | Why Is It Notable That Nonliterates "Know So Much" about Nature? | 5 |
| 1.3 | The Bases of Ethnobiological Classification | 8 |
| 1.4 | Relativist and Comparativist Approaches in Ethnobiology | 11 |
| 1.5 | General Principles of Ethnobiological Classification, 1966-1976 | 13 |
| 1.6 | Band-aids or Tune-up? General Principles, 1989 | 20 |
| 1.7 | Summary of General Principles | 31 |
| 1.8 | The Changing Conventions of Data Presentation as a Reflection of Changing Theory in Ethnobiological Classification | 35 |
| Ch. 2 | The Primacy of Generic Taxa in Ethnobiological Classification | 52 |
| 2.1 | The Selected Subset of Plants and Animals | 53 |
| 2.2 | The Concept of the Genus: Historical Antecedents | 54 |
| 2.3 | Evidence for the Perceptual Salience of Generic Taxa | 60 |
| 2.4 | Generic Taxa, Ethnobiological Rank, and Analytic Terminology | 64 |
| 2.5 | On Predicting the Subset of Generic Taxa | 78 |
| 2.6 | The Internal Structure of Folk Generic Taxa | 90 |
| 2.7 | Nature's Fortune 500+: Empirical Generalizations on the Upper Numbers of Generic Taxa in Systems of Ethnobiological Classification | 96 |
| Ch. 3 | The Nature of Specific Taxa | 102 |
| 3.1 | Distinctive Biological Properties of Specific Taxa | 103 |
| 3.2 | The Internal Structure of Specific Contrast Sets | 108 |
| 3.3 | Residual Categories? | 114 |
| 3.4 | General Nomenclatural Properties of Specific Taxa | 116 |
| 3.5 | Cultural Factors Contributing to the Recognition of Specific Taxa | 118 |
| 3.6 | Patterns in the Distribution and Size of Specific Contrast Sets | 122 |
| Ch. 4 | Natural and Not So Natural Higher-Order Categories | 134 |
| 4.1 | Higher-Order Categories in Ethnobiological Classification | 138 |
| 4.2 | Taxa of Intermediate Rank | 139 |
| 4.3 | Taxa of Life-Form Rank | 161 |
| 4.4 | The Nature of Unaffiliated Generic Taxa and the Life-Form Debate | 171 |
| 4.5 | Convert Groupings of Unaffiliated Generics = Covert Life Forms? | 176 |
| 4.6 | The Bases of Life-Form Taxa: Utilitarian vs. Perceptual Motivations | 181 |
| 4.7 | The Plant and Animal Kingdoms | 190 |
| Pt. 2 | Process | |
| Ch. 5 | Patterned Variation in Ethnobiological Knowledge | 199 |
| 5.1 | Werner's Gray-haired Omniscient Native Speaker-Hearer | 200 |
| 5.2 | The Basic Data of Ethnobiological Description and the Search for Patterns | 201 |
| 5.3 | Collecting the Basic Data from Which Patterns Might Emerge | 202 |
| 5.4 | Some Significant Types of Variation in Ethnobiological Knowledge | 203 |
| 5.5 | Discovering the Patterns Underlying the Biological Ranges of Folk Taxa | 206 |
| 5.6 | Some Factors Contributing to Cognitive Variation | 223 |
| Ch. 6 | Manchung and Bikua: The Nonarbitrariness of Ethnobiological Nomenclature | 232 |
| 6.1 | Early Experiments on Sound Symbolism | 234 |
| 6.2 | Ethnobiological Sound Symbolism in Huambisa: Birds and Fish | 235 |
| 6.3 | Universal Sound Symbolism or Simple Onomatopoeia? | 240 |
| 6.4 | Comparison with Other Ethnoornithological Vocabularies | 245 |
| 6.5 | Fish, Again | 247 |
| 6.6 | Closing Observations on Huambisa Sound Symbolism | 249 |
| 6.7 | "-r-" is for FROG | 250 |
| 6.8 | Lexical Reflections of Cultural Significance | 255 |
| Ch. 7 | The Substance and Evolution of Ethnobiological Categories | 260 |
| 7.1 | Toward a Substantive Inventory of Ethnobiological Categories | 261 |
| 7.2 | The Evolution of Ethnobiological Categories: Typological Speculations | 272 |
| 7.3 | Epilogue | 290 |
| References | 291 | |
| Author Index | 309 | |
| Index of Scientific Names | 313 | |
| Index of Ethnobiological Names | 322 | |
| Subject Index | 331 |