For him, “hedgehogs” are those people “who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think, and feel,” while the “foxes” are “those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle” (Berlin Reference Berlin2013:2).Īs metaphors for scholars, the fox and the hedgehog have become common shorthand not only for the contrast between broad generalists (foxes) and deep specialists (hedgehogs), but also for fundamental, antithetical ways of approaching knowledge. Berlin takes the words figuratively, applying them to divisions between human thinkers. The philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin began his best-known essay by quoting the line above, a fragment of the seventh-century b.c. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Although this article focuses exclusively on the fox and the armadillo, those species serve as examples through which we consider the limitations of applying Western taxonomic categories to other systems of knowledge, as well as the possibilities for how we might catch glimpses of radically different ways of organizing the world. Rather than accepting the creatures depicted on painted pottery or referenced in hieroglyphic texts as generalized examples of particular kinds (i.e., simply “a fox” or “an armadillo”), however, we show how the evidence from ancient art, historical accounts, and contemporary ethnography points to an emphasis on specific beings, often named individuals, who engage in particular behaviors and relate to other entities (both human and non-human) in distinctive ways. We use these species as a point of entry into Classic Maya categorizations of the non-human animal world, examining the salient biological and physical characteristics of those animals that Classic-period artists and scribes chose to highlight. This article investigates Classic Maya understandings of two particular animal species: the (gray) fox and the armadillo.
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