Visualizing spirit entities: naming, classification, and pictorial representation of pseudo-natural kinds in Nuaulu cosmography

This article re-examines the claim that supernatural entities can be treated as a semantic domain constituted of pseudo-natural kinds. It does so in relation to the Nuaulu people of Seram, eastern Indonesia, discussing ways of describing, visualizing, inventorying, and classifying spirits. While humans and animals are the models on which spirits are based, other features associated with how they are perceived and experienced as non-material entities (overlapping, ambiguity, blurring, shape-shifting) restrict the applicability of an approach inspired by studies of ethnobiological classification. The idea that spirits are like natural kinds rests on how people describe their morphology, as well as their behaviour and habitat. Evidence presented for the conceptualization of spirit forms includes stylized drawings. Nuaulu data are compared with European-based traditions representing physical features of supernatural beings. Over time these latter have become increasingly saturated with visual images, and have influenced popular renditions of the pseudo-natural kind theory.