This concerns 1) a constraint for foods based on use and 2) a
methodology for taxonomies and ontologies kept in song.
I stumbled upon a paper (Joel Sherzer, University of Texas at
Austin, 2000) on the Kuna natives of Panama. This is an excerpt. It
is a rather lengthy quote but it appears to be an important relating
of how ontologies can be maintained orally.
It also shows an alternate approach to universals such as that in
"Fire, Women...". In this example, classes of foods are maintained
by a constraint that defines who, outside of the family, can
received the food.
It also give a description for the native's ontology of a food group
that is captured in song.
The reference appears below the quote.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Howe and I found Kuna crops and wild forest products classified
according to the kinds of access people other than their owners
may have to them. Thus, corn is never given to anyone, coconuts
are given to family members, rice is offered to others by owners,
small quantities of bananas, avocados and yams are given when
asked for in advance, pineapples or sugarcane can be eaten on the
spot, limes and peppers can be taken home in a small quantity if
asked for (either before or after taking), mameys and mangos can
be taken home if they have fallen to the ground, and various kinds
of wild nuts are considered to not have any owners at all.
In addition to its mental or cognitive organization, this
classification is relevant to everyday life, in particular to such
critical problems in Kuna social and economic organization as
theft, generosity, and a conflict between cash crops and the
subsistence economy. In addition, Kuna individuals vary in their
application of some of these semantic/cognitive access rules. I
suspect that today we would find much more variation than we did
when we carried out this study, especially if we included Kuna
living in Panama City.
There is no doubt that Kuna vocabulary offers complex
organizations and classification of elements of ecology. One I
have looked into is that of kapur, the small hot peppers used in
curing rituals. Investigating the hot peppers mentioned in a
performance of kapur ikar “The Way of the Hot Pepper,” a chant
used to cure high fever, which I recorded, I found 53 types of hot
pepper, organized in classes (Sherzer 1974). These classes are
organized by such features as color (white, blue-green, and
multicolored pepper). There are naturally occurring forms, such as
sankwa-type pepper, as well as forms that have been transformed,
such as toasted and ground pepper. And there are forms that, while
not necessarily existing in nature, are part of the pepper
spirit/metaphorical world, such as misty pepper and transformed
like the sea pepper. The types of hot pepper are not named
randomly, but rather in systematic fashion, from both a semantic
point of view and within the chant itself. The naming of the hot
peppers takes place within a long portion of the chant in which a
particular pattern, with some slight variation, is repeated 53
times. In each repetition a different type of pepper is named. The
resulting discourse structure makes explicit the semantic taxonomy
of hot pepper used by the performer of the chant. The chant (and
the taxonomy on which it is based, or which it makes manifest)
lists each type of pepper followed by its subtypes. This semantic
taxonomy is plugged into a parallelistic pattern of the chant
structure in a systematic way, namely by beginning at the top of a
node in the taxonomy, moving down for each type and subtype until
it is completed, and then moving on. The verse pattern is
as follows:
“The Way of the Hot Pepper”
In the north
Name of pepper
Name of type of pepper
Name of subtype of pepper
Is named
The flowers are perceived
The leaves are perceived
The stems are perceived
The seeds are perceived
Knowledge of and especially utterance of long and complex lexical
taxonomies such as this one are important aspects of magical
power and control. Kuna ritual specialists must be botanical
taxonomists.
And in chants such as “The Way of the Hot Pepper,” knowledge
of Kuna ecology is archived. Information stored in such oral
archives
is extremely valuable to botanists interested in medical,
culinary, and
other properties of plants.
http://www.binal.ac.pa/panal/kuna/downloads/22_Language_and_Ecology.pdf
-John Bottoms
FirstStar Systems
Concord, MA
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