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manipulated food crop, whereas the interactions between the Solega, for instance,
and the bird species that live in their forests are far more opportunistic and long-
distance. A similar conclusion is reached by Ellen [ 72 ], who argues that the classi-
fi cation of frogs (not a food source) in Nuaulu is characterised by lexical variability
and uncertainty on the part of his consultants, because the depth of knowledge that
people have on any topic is determined by subsistence need, as much as it is by
perceptual salience. On the other hand, Berlin has made some strong claims regard-
ing the perceptual status of cultivated crops and the putative effect they have on the
appearance of sub- generic taxa in a community’s language. I have indicated in
Chap. 7 that I am not in favour of such generalisations, but I do believe that it is far
more likely that a community will have a ‘standardised’ body of knowledge (includ-
ing means of identifying sub-taxa) in the case of a highly manipulated group of
organisms such as a food crop, than for undomesticated creatures such as birds.
TEK in the latter situation is likely to be far more variable, as Gardner and Ellen
have described, and possibly even far more clumped in its distribution. By ‘clumped’,
I mean that not everyone would have the same level of knowledge as everyone else,
and that there could be individuals recognised as ‘ experts ’ in the community that
others would defer to. Such expertise can come about through culturally-sanctioned
division of labour, chance events that lead an individual to specialise in a particular
domain, or simple interest and aptitude, which allow and individual to concentrate
on a topic that s/he enjoys [ 227 ]. Similarly, social, cultural and ontogenetic circum-
stances can lead to a lack of expertise, or even basic knowledge about certain
domains.
Solega villages can be physically separated from one another by large (to walk)
distances. As mentioned in the Ethnographic Sketch (Chap. 1 ), people from distant
villages might not see one another except at festival times or family celebrations.
Such a situation is ideal for the divergence of not only village-based dialects
(although I have yet to study this phenomenon systematically), as well as village-
based bodies of traditional knowledge. The variation in bird name s and classifi ca-
tion reported in Chap. 4 provides clear evidence that each village may have its own
set of lexemes that denote natural kinds (albeit with considerable overlap with
neighbouring villages). Of course, physical separation is not a prerequisite for varia-
tion in TEK—Gardner’s study, mentioned above, was carried out among a small
community living in the same locality, and yet uncovered high levels of inter-
individual variation in bird naming and classifi cation schemes. It could be argued
that geographic isolation might only exacerbate such tendencies, leading to even
higher levels of variability in communities such as the Solega. Two factors external
to TEK need to be kept in mind when discussing the sort of variation shown in
Chap. 4. First, as the Solega inhabit a wide geographical range (high-altitude ever-
green forest s to scrub forests on the lowlands), people in different locations are
likely to be exposed to different suites of plant and animal species. This would obvi-
ously lead to a divergence in TEK over time; indeed, it was noted that people from
the lowland village of A:repa:ḷya were not able to reliably name any of the birds
that were restricted to the evergreen forest. Second, the lifestyle change that has
come about in recent years due to Lantana and social infl uences from the rest of the