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About Brent
Brent Berlin is the Graham Perdue Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, where he also served as director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute and co-director of the Laboratories of Ethnobiology. He earned a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma in 1959, an M.A. from Stanford University in 1960, and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University in 1964. Berlin's research centers on ethnobiology, cognitive science, and the Mayan area, with extensive fieldwork among the Tzeltal Maya of Chiapas, Mexico, and other indigenous groups. His studies explore folk biological classification systems, ethnobotanical knowledge, and perceptual foundations of categorization in traditional societies.
Berlin's groundbreaking publication, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969, co-authored with Paul Kay), analyzed color terminology across 98 languages and proposed seven universal evolutionary stages centered on 11 focal colors, profoundly impacting anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive science by suggesting cognitive universals in color perception. Key works include Covert Categories and Folk Taxonomies (1968, with Dennis E. Breedlove and Peter H. Raven), Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification (1974), Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies (1992), and Medical Ethnobiology of the Highland Maya of Chiapas, Mexico: The Gastrointestinal Diseases (1996, with Elois Ann Berlin). He directed the Maya ICBG bioprospecting project from 1998 to 2001. Berlin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980 (Section 51, Anthropology) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1981. He received the Fyssen Foundation Prize in 2000 and, jointly with Elois Ann Berlin, the Distinguished Economic Botanist Award in 2008 from the Society for Economic Botany, recognizing lifetime contributions to economic botany.
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