The Vanishing Names of Rats

What we lose when children forget how to name the world

The Morning of Many Rats

In a Santhal hamlet on the Sagardwip island, West Bengal, I once sat with a group of children as they played near a storage of paddy. When the conversation turned to rats, they began to recite names: one for the rat that gnaws through sacks before sowing, another for the rat that raids harvest piles at night, a third for the rat that follows people indoors, and yet another for the rat that flees to higher ground when the monsoon swells.

These were not synonyms but situational categories, each tied to an encounter. Each name captured a relationship: a rat as thief, a rat as omen, a rat as neighbor who shared the granary. What textbooks collapsed into a single word, rat, the children unfolded into an ecology of presence and consequence.

I realized then what Scott Atran and Douglas Medin have called the universals of folkbiology: that humans everywhere sort living beings into kinds, but the texture of those kinds depends on practice and culture. The Santhali children were not simply naming rodents; they were mapping a world of relations.

Universals and Their Discontents

Cognitive scientists remind us that across cultures, people naturally form “generic…