© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 173
A. Si, The Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Solega, Ethnobiology,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24681-9_6
Chapter 6
Signs and Relationships
6.1 Introduction
Having examined, in some detail, the physical and biological environment that the
Solega live in, we now turn our attention to the realm of the intangible—a realm
populated by multitudes of meaningful signs and relationships which enable Solega
people to navigate a world that is at once familiar, complex and sometimes danger-
ous. Knowledge of the existence of a particular type of fl owering plant in the
evergreen forest is no doubt important to a Solega, but equally important are obser-
vations that the plant grows in a particular habitat, fl owers at a particular time of the
year, is eaten or visited by a particular type of animal or insect, and can be used by
humans for a particular purpose. After all:
Organisms are not separate; they are linked. They are linked by their own relations—sign
relations. These relations themselves should be our objects [of study] if we want to under-
stand the life process of living communities, life as it happens in ecosystems. From a
semiotic point of view, ecological communities are not sets of organisms (or species) as
elements; instead, a community is a composition of relations between the organisms or
species [ 201 ].
The principal intent of the author of the above quote (and of other ‘biosemioti-
cians’) is the “ semiotic description of biological communities”, rather than the elu-
cidation of the ways in which “sign relations” are encoded in human languages.
Indeed, some biosemioticians are eager to distance themselves from the so-called
“glottocentrism that is enshrined in cultural analysis” [ 202 ], i.e. the efforts of lin-
guists and anthropologists, who concentrate on verbal and artefact-based symbols
and signs, at the expense of natural ones. Nevertheless, many of the central concepts
and questions of the biosemiotic enterprise can be easily transferred to the fi eld of
ethnobiological enquiry. The idea of an organism’s Umwelt , its subjective world,
was fi rst proposed by Jakob von Uexküll, and later redefi ned [ 203 ] as a “personal
semiotic space”. A ‘semiosphere’, then, is “the set of all interconnected umwelten”,
which is quite different from the physical environment in the scientifi c sense. In the