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6.2.3 (Spatial) Collocations
The knowledge of ‘what is found where’ forms the core of any human’s under-
standing of his/her environment. One would expect people living away from urban
centres to be well aware of the preferred habitats of plants and animals, and the
Solega are no exception. Chapter 5 describes in some detail the Solega’s knowl-
edge of the plant assemblages associated with different topographies , climatic
c onditions and substrates. In this context , elephants are said to prefer certain types
of vegetation during particular seasons, and this has an important impact on the
free movement of humans through the landscape. Their knowledge of bird and
smaller animal species distributions is equally fi ne-grained, and takes into account
potentially complicating behaviours such as feeding, reproduction and migration
patterns. The following example deals with the habits of the ko:kunji ‘poss. Slaty-
legged Crake’:
Ko:kunji bu:miliye. Ṭĩyanakki tara, kallu se:rsukoṇḍu alli mari kaṭtade. Haḷḷada kaḍegaḷalli
ka:ṇta:irtade.
The ko:kunji stays only on the ground. Like the lapwing, it collects stones, and has its
young there. You can see it around the banks of streams.
The Solega recognise several prominent je: nu mara ‘ bee tree s ’, which can be
home to 40–50 individual giant honeybee colonies (see Chap. 7 for further discus-
sion). This represents one of the most prominent examples of a reliable spatial col-
location between two organisms. Another spatial collocation that used to be far
more common in the days of burning (and consequently, the days before the Lantana
camara invasion) is the presence of nela je:nu ‘ground-dwelling bees’ (actually
instances of Apis cerana nesting in abandoned animal burrows) close to patches of
nela hu: ‘ground-cover fl owers’, the source of the special honey of the same name.
Both organisms are now rare due to the massive proliferation of Lantana on the for-
est fl oor, which has caused bees to mainly nest on/in large trees.
Mushrooms are plentiful in the BRT forest, but the Solega only name and eat a
small subset of these organisms. Here, too, spatial collocations are highly meaning-
ful, and operate at two distinct levels. At the macro-level, it is important to know
that the doḍḍaṇabe ‘big mushroom ’ and eṇṇe aṇabe ‘oil mushroom’ are found in
dry clearings, grassland , cultivated areas or burnt patches of ground, whereas spe-
cies such as ko:ḷi aṇabe ‘chicken mushroom’ are found in moist, densely forested
areas. These three mushroom types grow out of the ground, whereas beṇḍe aṇabe
and karava:di aṇabe sprout from rotting tree logs. Knowledge of spatial collocation
at the micro-level is necessary at this point, as the latter two mushrooms are only
said to grow on the rotting logs of the beṇḍe ( Kydia calycina ) and karava:di ( Persea
macrantha ) trees respectively, after which the mushrooms are named. The Solega
are wary, for good reason, of eating mushrooms they do not recognise and/or name.
The two wood-mushroom species may well grow on other substrates, while other
mushroom species very likely grow on the logs of the two trees named above.
However, the prescription of a tight, formal association between a mushroom of a
6 Signs and Relationships