175explicit part of the Solega ethnobiological knowledge system. An investigation of
the ways in which Solega speakers encode knowledge of such signs and phenomena
in everyday language should yield valuable insights into their perceptions of the
natural environment. These insights should also help construct a far more detailed
picture of Solega perceptions than that obtained from a consideration of their ethno-
classifi cation system alone.
While this chapter is not meant as a formal semiotic analysis of the Umwelt of the
Solega speaker or of the other Umwelten that share a semiosphere with him, it nev-
ertheless acknowledges the conviction held by many biosemioticians that “the scope
of semiotics encompasses the whole of the oikoumene , the entirety of our planetary
biosphere,” and that semiosis “must be recognized as a pervasive fact of nature as
well as of culture” (Sebeok 1977 in [ 204 ]). Members of traditional societies are
often credited with possessing an “impressive” knowledge of their habitat [ 9 ], and I
argue below that it is actually the correct interpretation of a host of non- verbal signs
that makes this knowledge accessible. The Solega speaker’s knowledge of nature^1
thus becomes a matter of intercepting signs and interpreting their signifi cance.
6.2 Types of Signs
As mentioned earlier, Solega people, as presumably do all humans, draw on the vast
amount of information encoded in environmental signals (biological, as well as
non-living) to make decisions on matters that have a bearing on their daily lives. The
most important kinds of information, relating to the existence of useful forest
resources, are described below. Note that the following discussion highlights infor-
mation that Solega people explicitly mentioned to me either during interviews or
more informal discussions. Implicit signs, i.e. signs which Solega speakers do not
normally articulate, are also undoubtedly very important in everyday life, and might
include, for instance, the visual features of a plant that allow its identifi cation even
with a cursory glance from some distance. Solega people struggle to identify and
describe such cues, just as English speakers might have some diffi culty elucidating,
in words alone, the difference between a ‘tulip’ and a ‘lily’. Such matters are prob-
ably best studied by an investigator of cognitive phychology, and will not be further
mentioned here (although see Excursus 6.1 for a brief explication).
The explicit signs that indicate that availability or usefulness of forest resources
can be broadly divided into four categories.
a) Long-term cycles,
b) Short-term cycles and (temporal) coincidences,
c) (Spatial) collocations and
d) Intrinsic signals
(^1) It should be pointed out that biosemioticians, in general, do not support ontological binaries such
as nature/culture, matter/mind and verbal/non-verbal (Cobley 2010), arguing instead that culture,
for instance, is merely a part of nature.
6.2 Types of Signs