18
Q1: What’s that?
A1: That’s a Greater Bamboo Lemur. (‘specifi c’/’varietal’)
(A biologist leading a group of nature lovers on a wildlife trip)Q2: What’s that?
A2: That’s a lemur. (‘ generic ’)
(A biologist addressing a passing tourist)Q3: What’s that?
A3: That’s an animal. (‘kingdom’^4 )
(A biologist who has been identifying bird calls for a group of birdwatchers, and
is asked to identify a novel call)
The above examples show that context plays a highly important role in allowing
the respondent (the biologist) to decide on the level of specifi city required to answer
any given question. The relevance of Grice ’s maxims to the interview scenario is far
from being a conclusive refutation of Berlin ’s claims about the primacy of ‘ generic ’
taxa. However, the maxims do demonstrate that elicited data are highly context-
specifi c, and that naturalistic speech should be given pride of place in any ethnobio-
logical investigation.
A system of TEK that is understood only through a classifi catory system—elic-
ited outside the normal contexts in which people interact with living organisms—is
akin to a biological species that is perceived exclusively through the four-letter
alphabet of its genome. It is true that an organism would not exist without its genome,
but it is equally true that there is far more to an organism than a mere sequence of
nucleotides. A genome predisposes an organism to certain structural, physiological
and behavioural models, but the vast literature on epigenetic phenomena has dem-
onstrated without a doubt that life is all about the interaction of genomes with the
environments within which organisms grow, swim, crawl or fl y. Similarly, an ethno-
taxonomy serves a very limited purpose unless it is situated in the everyday contexts
that the speakers of that language would recognize. A study in language- centered
ethnobiology is incomplete unless it addresses the question of how people commu-
nicate with each other about biological themes; as argued above, such communica-
tive performance is inextricably tied not only to norms of linguistic practice that are
accepted by the community as natural, but also to the rich store of encyclopaedic
knowledge that speakers possess of the entities and phenomena being discussed.
1.5 Book Outline
In the following chapters, I have attempted to capture not only the ‘ encyclopaedic
knowledge ’, but also the “ situational and socio-cultural contexts ” that some of the
authors cited above have deemed necessary, in order to properly understand the
(^4) ‘Animal’ is a ‘kingdom’ level taxon according to Berlin [ 9 ], but Wierzbicka [ 44 ] has challenged
this claim.
1 Introduction