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His house is such a mess!” Wouldn’t that be terrible? How shameful! In the same way,
elephants , other animals, all humans that have ever lived, be it the 90 million ants that crawl
on the ground or any other form of life, all living beings need to keep their life in order. If
everything is in order, diseases will not affect us.
Solega speakers do not hesitate to make use of anthropocentric analogies to help
explain the behaviour of all manner of animals. One might suspect that only mam-
mals are so privileged due to their overall similarity to humans, but the following
extract shows that human-like qualities may even be attributed to invertebrates, such
as the honeybee:
Ade meneka adu gurtade. Adu elli hoṇṭo:girtade, puna banda:de. I:ga, ni:vu illi ivire. Illi
iddu ni:vu oitivire. Ho:gu uṭṭu bara be:ka:dare elli bara be:ku? Alligave bara be:ku.
Ha:geve je:nina kombu—a: je: nu bandu mudi tu:kidadella, a: tara ni:vu. A: je:nu illi
ku:turu, a: tuppa ella se:rsi, idella u:ṭa ma:ḍu uṭṭu, tuppa ti:rtade enda:ga oṇṭodde. Oṇṭo:gi
matte puna e:va ṭaiminalli bara be:ku, a: ṭaiminalli bandu ku:tumadu. Ashṭu kelsa je:nu
ma:ḍa kelsa—mansa he:ge ma:ḍdade, aduve ade tara ma:ḍdade. I:ga na:vu ku:turu
ma:ta:ḍtivĩ, mu:r jana uve. Na:vu edduru oṭṭoitivĩ, puna innondu jina banda:ga, elli bandu
ku:tõ? Alligave—je:nu kaṭṭa kombigave!
It remembers its own home. It goes away somewhere, then comes back. Now, you’re right
here. After a while, you go away. If you want to come back, what do you do? You need to
come right back here. It’s the same with a bee’s [home] branch—the colony comes and cre-
ates a new home, just like you. The bees sit there, collect honey , eat their food, and once the
honey’s gone, they fl y away. And when they need to come back some other time, they return
and land [there]. That’s what bees do—they do exactly what people do. Now, the three of
us are sitting here, having a chat. We get up and go away, but if we want to meet another
day, where do we go and sit? Right here—back at the bees’ home branch!
There are other lines of evidence that support the hypothesis that Solega people
really do identify with a range of non-human organisms—examples can be found,
in Solega mythology, of organisms that are said to possess human-like traits. In
some cases, this is the result of an organism once having been a human, who was
forced to take on a non-human form due to extenuating circumstances. Trees were
once humans who had avoided offering any aid to the god ma:desurã during his
battle with the demon savaṇa. Seeing that these same people expected to profi t from
savaṇa ’s death in spite of their inaction, ma:desurã , in a fi t of rage, cursed his cow-
ardly followers, and turned them into trees where they stood. In another story, a
woman was charged with caring for her aged in-laws while her husband was away,
but was woefully negligent in carrying out her duty. Upon his return, the husband
found his parents in a poor state of health, and cursed his wife, turning her into a dog
that fl ed before his wrath. A third story tells of a woman who was treated poorly by
her mother-in-law, being asked to perform a laborious task that the latter had ensured
could never be completed. The woman was left working at home, while the
mother- in- law put on her fi nery, and set out for a festival. The woman, seething at
being tricked, used some household objects, and turned herself into an elephant —a
winnowing fan for ears, a long pestle for a trunk, four grinding stones for feet, a
bamboo barrel for her body and a broom for a tail. She hid in the forest by the path
that her mother-in-law was bound to take, and upon seeing her returning from the
festival, threw her to the ground with her trunk, and trampled her to death.
6 Signs and Relationships