1214.7 Birds in Solega Life, Myth and Ritual
In the fi nal section of this chapter, we describe the very important status that birds
enjoy in the secular and religious life of Solega speakers. Birds, in general, play two
important roles in Solega folklore : the fi rst is that of a herald of important natural
phenomena, both benign and noxious, while the second is that of a moral arbiter that
sounds the alarm when important social or cultural taboos are broken. One might
speculate that the reason birds are said to possess such gifts is the position they
occupy in the physical environment—perched on trees and other high places, they
observe not only the world of humans, but also the activities of other animals. As
birds communicate their messages to humans through their various calls, it is not
surprising that a good number of their vocalisations have been lexicalised as ideo-
phones in Solega (Table 4.7 ).
As far as we can tell, there is no special purpose symbolic classifi cation scheme
in Solega. During our fi eldwork, we did not record any lexemes that labelled catego-
ries of ‘malefi cent birds’ (along the lines of the nocturnal birds that according to the
Nage make the sound po [ 63 ]), ‘birds that warn of danger’ or ‘birds associated with
a god’, for instance. Nor were there any named utilitarian categories such as ‘birds
Fig. 4.3 Pigeons /doves found in BRT, and their Solega labels, if any. Previously published in
[ 167 ]
4.7 Birds in Solega Life, Myth and Ritual