The map is not the territory: taxonomy and classification

The map is by necessity a simplification. Where map and territory differ, the only option is to abide by the territory. Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash

I have been reflecting recently on how as animist-polytheists we seem to often get into discussions about how to classify and draw boundaries between different sorts of beings. Where is the line between a spirit and a God? Are land-wights the Dead? Are they different to the Fair Folk?

Humans seem to love categories and classifying things into neat groups. Sometimes this manifests in ways that are trivial, like people who get into MBTI personality types, or the continuing popularity of YA fiction that revolves around different groups readers can identify with. In other cases it can have profound effects on people’s lives, for example, how Western society constructs and attempts to enforce the categories of “male” and “female”.

While I was an undergrad studying biomedical sciences, I learned a little about taxonomy. Taxonomy is the process of organising things into a hierarchical classification system – in biology this usually refers to studying how closely related different organisms or groups of organisms are, evolutionarily speaking. For instance, a housecat and a lion are different species, but they are both in the Felidae family, indicating they are more closely related to each other than to dogs and foxes, both in the Canidae family. So far so good.

However, it’s not always clear how to define the lines of your taxonomic categories. Here’s an example: the eastern coyote has a mixture of ancestry from coyotes, wolves, and domestic dogs. Some scientists consider it to be a separate species in its own right, on account of it being different physiologically and genetically from coyotes and wolf species, while others consider it to be simply a hybrid of other species, or best categorised as a subspecies of coyote [1].

(Taxonomists have helpfully come up with a categorisation for themselves based on how they appraoch these problems: lumpers and splitters. Lumpers tend to err on the side of grouping things together – a lumper would say an eastern coyote is just a coyote subspecies. Splitters on the other hand prefer solutions with separate groups, and would call an eastern coyote its own species.)

Here’s the thing. Taxonomy is unclear in these cases because the hierarchy of species, genus, family, etc, is not an intrinsic property of nature, it is a concept invented by humans and projected onto nature so we can understand it more easily. It is a model, a way of understanding an aspect of something that must not be confused with the reality of the thing itself.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

George Box

Eastern coyotes will continue to live their lives and hunt and breed entirely unaffected by our human ideas of species and the quandry they cause to scientists. These realities will continue regardless of how we categorise them. Just as the reality of my intersex body is unchanged regardless of how society defines sex and gender. Just as the realities of those spirits we struggle to classify as this or that are unchanged regardless of how we refer to them and think of them.

Categories and labels can be useful tools to analyse things and break them down for ourselves. But when we as humans try to define such groupings, we must be humble enough to understand and accept that these will never be perfect, will never capture the true nature of what we are describing. The human experience, the natural world, the Gods and spirits and Ancestors, all are too multifarious and subtle for that.

When we try to classify Gods and spirits – to say, these are Fair Folk, these are land-wights, these are Ælfas, these are the Dead – really we are trying to map out how They behave and how we should behave toward Them. To map out where They fit in our worldview, the sweep of our cosmology.

But the map is not the territory. And we must not privilege the map over what it describes.

Practicing heathenry, or other polytheisms, is a lifelong walk through the territory of our ensouled, living, animistic world. A map may be useful but it can never capture everything about the territory, about the experience of that walk and how to understand it, what trees we will pass and what animals we will see and whether it will rain and what it all means to us. If there is a river in our path where the map shows none, we might annotate it accordingly, but what we should never do is plough ahead expecting reality to conform to what we expect to find.

The Gods and the spirits and the Ancestors Who live alongside us are infinite in Their variety, Their individuality, Their beauty. What names and what labels we ascribe to Them are far less important than how we engage with Them, how we relate to Them, how we honour Them. And whatever names and labels we do attribute to Them, They will be unchanged; They will be, as ever, as always, completely and perfectly Themselves. They exist outside of our control, beyond our power to define, and we must meet Them as they are.

References

1. Northeastern coyote/coywolf admixture and taxonomy: a meta-analysis – JG Way & WS Lynn, 2016, Canid Biology & Conservation