Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

may reflect local phenotypic diversity within the species, as I have already discussed
in chapter 4.2.6.
Some evidence was found for degeneracy within the ethnozoological lexicon:
sometimes informants, when presented with an obscure specimen for identification,
suggested that although they did not know the name, an older person might, or that
it might once have had a name but that this was now forgotten. Further work could
aim to investigate the patterning of knowledge among different age groups further.
Zoological terms appeared to be consistently applied by different people, regardless
of age or gender.
The extent to which zoological groups are aggregated into broader, named
groups in the Wapishana language is limited; few words corresponding to higher-order
folk categories are in regular use. There is no unique beginner in the animal kingdom:
the nearest equivalent is 'aimaakannao', a word that also means 'things'. When
applied to animals, it appears to have two or three different meanings, corresponding
to several levels of inclusiveness. It was not entirely clear to me whether any of these
meanings corresponded exactly to the zoological sense of the term 'animal'. The
conceptual distinctness of the zoological domain was demonstrated by the use of a
binary classification of animals based on perceived edibility. 'Wunii' refers to edible
animals, 'mawuniki' to those not considered edible. All animals appear to be
assigned to one of these two groups. Membership of these groups appears to be
flexible according to personal dietary idiosyncrasies. One man who told me he had
eaten jaguar on occasion, suggested that this meant that it had now become wunii
for him.
The animals are linguistically subdivided into higher order groups along at least
three crosscutting systems. One is that based on use value described above, another
is ecological, based on habitat use, and a third appears to be based on perceptual
similarity. In the latter system, higher order categories often, but not always,
correspond to phylogenetic groups. Major categories in this system included
kopaunao (fish), kotu'uzanao (birds), kowazazunao (snakes), baudokorunao
(felids and some other carnivores) and more restricted uses of the term
'aimaakannao', which in some circumstances appeared roughly equivalent to
mammals, in others incorporated members of other phylogenetic groups. As has
already been mentioned in the case of wuradanao, some more inclusive groups are
formed by pluralising the name of a focal species. These include kibaronao
(anurians) waronao (parrots) and powatunao, which includes monkeys (powatu is
also the specific name for Cebus apella) and other arboreal mammals. People