198
with “no reported cultural utility”. Suggesting a possible mechanism to explain why
agriculture and nomenclatural proliferation should be so linked, Berlin states:
There seems to be little doubt that domestication led, and continues to lead, to the creation
of folk specifi c taxa. It also follows that a cognitively qualitative difference manifests itself
as part of the process of human beings’ conscious construction and manipulation of new
and perceptually different forms of life. Based on this qualitative difference in their interac-
tion with living things—a kind of interaction that is in many respects consciously experi-
mental—individuals begin to take in what might be called a second, more careful look at
nature. People begin to be more systematic in the way they deal with the biological world.
Regions of the biological space that they had known all along as undifferentiated generic
gestalten are now looked upon in greater detail, perhaps even submitted to close study
[ Berlin ’s emphasis]. Heretofore unnoticed objective differences are recognized explicitly
for the fi rst time. Two closely related but unimportant species, at one time unremarkable
from a cognitive point of view, now become worthy of linguistic recognition—as distinct
parts of what was once a single folk generic taxon. (p. 286)
The generalisations in the quote above give the reader the impression that the
“cognitively qualitative difference”, which occurred in the minds of agriculturalists ,
and led them to coin binomial folk-specifi c names for various crop plants could also
lead to a greater differentiation of “ generic gestalten” in other biological domains as
well—birds, fi sh and mammals, perhaps. However, Berlin restricts his discussion to
the topic of agriculturally signifi cant plants, making no mention of how this pro-
posed mechanism might apply to various animal taxa in the same culture. Is Berlin
suggesting that the expertise gained in making more fi ne-grained distinctions
between crop varieties is somehow transferred to other biological domains?
Psychological experiments indicate that this is an unlikely scenario [ 210 ]. More
troubling is his very strong claim that people whose languages contain folk-specifi c
lexemes (keeping in mind that folk-specifi cs are indicated by their binomial nature)
have a “more careful”, “more systematic” view of nature, one possessing “greater
detail”, as a result of possible “close study”. At the same time, Berlin implies that
certain “objective differences” probably go “unnoticed” by hunter-gatherer s , the
only evidence being that they do not have appropriate labels for subgeneric taxa. I
discuss these nomenclatural issues in some detail in Chap. 2 (see especially Sect.
2.6 for a discussion on the issue of folk-specifi cs in Anindilyakwa and other
Australian languages). In this chapter, however, I will restrict my discussion to the
issue of the depth of knowledge that hunter-gatherers might have about an organism
that, among the Solega, is not “managed by constant and direct human interven-
tion”—the honeybee.
Although the Solega can be classed as ‘ agriculturalists ’, by virtue of their culti-
vation of fi nger millet , corn, pumpkin, banana and more recently, coffee, they have
also traditionally performed subsistence activities that are unambiguously of the
‘ hunter-gatherer ’ variety. This includes the collection of a range of foodstuffs (fruit,
mushrooms , honey , edible leaves, etc.), medicines, cleaning and personal grooming
products, construction materials and materials for clothing from wild plants which
grow naturally in a range of forest habitats (Sect. 3.9 ). In the following, I will argue
that the Solega’s knowledge of the biology of honeybees (a resource that they
‘gather’ from, rather than ‘constantly manage’) is remarkably accurate and consistent,
7 Honeybee Lore