Culture is only possible if humans can distinguish between things and classify them. Much of the work of classification is sub-conscious. Humans need to develop classification to identify things. Without classification they cannot make sense of human nature.

Far from being the case .... that social relations of men are based on logical relations between things; in reality it is the former which have provided the prototype for the latter.   ....   ....   The first logical categories were social categories; the first classes of things were classes of men.
(Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification, [originally published 1902], quoted Haralambos, Sociology Themes and Perspectives, 5th edn., 2000, page 887; 6th edn., 2004, page 784).

Mauss had distinguished a simple society in the aboriginal inhabitants of the Port MacKay area of Australia' and he found a more complicated system in groups of aboriginal in Queensland.  The first group used a system based on moieties (moiety = half)
 The second group used a system based on four parts.
 In each system the place of something could affect what a person was permitted to eat.
 A modern comparison is the practising Jew who will not eat diary products, e.g. milk, cream or cheese with meat products, e.g. lamb or beef. This rule is strictly applied in public restaurants in the modern state of Israel: coffee is always served away from the dining table. If served at the table it is accompanied by artificial whiteners.
 More complex societies also studied by Mauss, such as the native North American Indians such as the Zuni Sioux have more complex systems of classification.

This may look "primitive" but it is the basis of all classification systems.
 Classification systems
 1. establish a hierarchy.
 2. establish relationships between groups of things.
 3. make the organic world comprehensible.