236
pointed out, and rightly so, that “ TEK is ecological knowledge ”, while Lewis [ 236 ],
elaborating further on this issue, has stated that the study of TEK
ultimately proceeds to considerations of processes (functional relationships): the under-
standings that people have of environmental systems and the networks of cause and effect
therein. A part of these understandings involves a people’s perceptions of their own roles
within environmental systems: how they affect, and how they are affected by, natural pro-
cesses. (p. 9)
Given the Solega’s empathic outlook, it is quite unsurprising that they are so
intimately familiar with the hidden world of the honeybee colony, whose inner
workings—from the Solega perspective—are described in Chap. 7. Here too,
anthropocentric references abound, with the queen bee or ra:ṇi ‘queen’ said to be
like the awwe ‘mother’ of all the worker bees or kunni ‘girl’. The drones or kuruḍu
noṇa ‘blind fl ies’ are lazy and lacking in strength, and many other aspects of honey-
bee behaviour are explained in terms of human-like responses to the needs and
desires that an individual bee or the entire colony might be faced with. The main
argument presented in the chapter, however, is that in spite of not being beekeepers ,
the Solega’s knowledge of honeybee behaviour and reproductive biology rivals that
of pre-industrial beekeeping cultures. The data presented in this chapter argue
against two crucial points made by Berlin : fi rst, that domestication leads to the rec-
ognition and naming of ‘ folk specifi c ’ taxa, and second, that hunter-gatherer s tend
to be less ‘careful’, less ‘systematic’ than agriculturalists in the way they look at
nature, or deal with the natural world. The Solega clearly have ‘folk specifi c’ labels
for the four bee species known to them, and the depth of their bee lore rivals, and is
in some cases more accurate than, that of Aristotle , who had access to the knowl-
edge of Greek beekeepers. Subsequently, the Solega recognise the queen bee and
the workers as females, and know of the twin strategies of honeybee reproduction
(producing new offspring and swarming to create new colonies), the behaviour of a
swarm and its purpose, the connection between visits by honeybees and fruit-set on
fl owering plants, and the foraging activity of worker bees as the mechanism by
which the ‘ honey ’ obtained from fl owers is transported to the hive.
8.6 Concluding Remarks
This book began with a discussion of a very mainstream pre-occupation in linguistic
ethnobiology—the elucidation of the ethno-classifi cation systems of non-industrial
cultures, and the testing of hypotheses concerning the cross-linguistic universality
of certain ways of naming and categorising living organisms. I have not only pre-
sented numerous counter-examples from Solega to refute some key ‘universals’ but
also questioned, as have other authors, the appropriateness of investigating ethno-
classifi cations outside normal social contexts. Using current developments in evolu-
tionary biology, as well as ongoing debates in biological systematics and taxonomy,
I have also argued that some very fundamental assumptions, on which the idea of
8 Conclusions