© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 227
A. Si, The Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Solega, Ethnobiology,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24681-9_8
Chapter 8
Conclusions
8.1 The Nature of TEK
The publication of “the ethnoclassifi cation of taxon X in language L” can give a
reader the impression that such a classifi cation scheme represents an accepted norm
in the speech community, and that an average member of that community would
have a mental representation that resembled, at least closely, the abstract scheme
presented by the researcher. The issues surrounding Solega bird classifi cation, dis-
cussed in Chap. 4 , and to a lesser extent, the semantics of the forest terms, discussed
in Chap. 5 , suggest that caution is required in generalising from the speech or TEK
of a handful of individuals to the linguistic norms or TEK of an entire community.
In his investigation of variability in Dene bird nomenclature and classifi cation,
Gardner [ 68 ] reported phenomena that are strikingly similar to those discussed in
Chap. 4 , such as the idiosyncratic coining of names, considerable phonetic variation
in bird name s (in spite of the community only having 120 adults), lack of knowl-
edge of the name of certain important species, and lexical variation that went far
beyond the merely phonetic. Faced with this level of variation Gardner, in his
“requiem for the omniscient informant”, concluded tentatively that although mem-
bers of a community share certain beliefs and a certain body of knowledge, they
also exhibit considerable cognitive variation. Reacting to what he saw as too pessi-
mistic a view of the ethnographic enterprise, Boster [ 67 ] showcased the knowledge,
among the Aguaruna Jivaro, of the over 60 varieties of manioc cultivated for food.
Based on his experimental results involving a large number of consultants, Boster
concluded that although variation was present at different “layers of social identity”,
namely ‘adult member of the society’, ‘mature woman’, ‘close kinswoman’, and
‘the individual’, there was nevertheless a single culturally accepted model of man-
ioc categorisation.
Boster makes a compelling case for the existence of a core body of manioc-
related knowledge, with little inter-individual idiosyncratic variation, but unfor-
tunately his study ignores a key variable—the fact that manioc is an intensively