The Meaning of “Tree” in Two Different Tupí-Guaraní Languages from Two Different Neotropical Forests

 

William Balée

Tulane University

E-mail: wbalee@tulane.edu

 

Marilyn Cebolla Badie

University of Barcelona

E-mail: macebolla@ub.edu

 

Abstract


Data are presented to show whether the terms for ‘tree’ in two different but related languages, Ka’apor or Urubu-Ka'apor (henceforth, Ka'apor) and Mbya-Guarani (henceforth, Mbya), are in fact cognate terms in having the same intensional meanings. These terms are myra (Ka'apor) and yvyra (Mbya). Data gathered from freelisting exercises among the two groups are compared to knowledge of architecture and dynamics of trees, basal area of trees, and local forestry in the two habitats to determine whether psychological salience rankings of taxa listed in the freelists match features of the environment and of the flora. Psychological salience is inferred by Smith's S. The data indicate that philosophical and linguistic axioms regarding trees as 'big and hard' tend to be supported statistically and ecologically with data from the two different languages in the two different forests of this study.

 

Keywords: tree terms, Tupí-Guaraní languages, philosophical deduction, psychological salience

 

Resumo


São apresentados dados para mostrar se os termos para 'árvore' em duas línguas diferentes, mas relacionadas, Ka’apor ou Urubu-Ka'apor (daqui em diante Ka'apor) e Mbya-Guarani (daqui em diante Mbya), são de fato termos cognatos ao possuírem os mesmos significados intencionais. Os termos são myra (Ka'apor) e yvyra (Mbya). Dados obtidos através de exercícios livres de listagem ('freelisting') de termos entre os dois grupos são comparados para conhecimento da arquitetura e dinâmica de árvores, área basal ou dominância relativa das árvores e manejo de árvores em dois habitats para determinar se as posições de importância psicológica de cada espécie listada de maneira livre encontram correspondência no meio ambiente e na flora. A importância psicológica é medida pelo s de Smith (Smith's s'). Os dados indicam que axiomas filosóficos e linguísticos para referência a árvores como 'grande e dura' tendem a ser suportados estatisticamente e ecologicamente com dados das duas línguas nas duas florestas que foram o foco desse estudo.


Palavras-chave: árvore, Tupi-Guarani, dedução filosófica, importância psicológica.


Résumé


Les données sont présentées pour montrer que les mots pour 'arbre' dans deux langues différentes, Ka'apor ou Urubu-Ka'apor (desormais Ka'apor) et Mbya-Guarani (desormais Mbya) mais connexes sont en fait des mots connexes dans le même sens déductif. Ces mots sont myra (Ka'apor) et yvyra (Mbya). Les données recueillies à partir des exercices de la liste-libre (freelisting) entre les deux groupes sont comparés à la connaissance de l'architecture et la dynamique des arbres, surface terrière des arbres et l'exploitation forestière locale dans les deux habitats afin de déterminer si les classements de saillance psychologique taxons inscrits dans les listes correspondent à des caractéristiques de l'environnement et de la flore. Psychological salience est déduit par 'Smith's s.' Les données indiquent que les axiomes philosophiques et linguistiques en ce qui concerne les arbres comme 'rands et dures' ont tendance à être soutenu par les statistiques et l'environnement des données de deux différents languages dans les deux forêts de la présente étude.


Mots clés: les mots pour arbre, les langues tupi-guarani, déduction philosophique, salience psychologique

 

'He who knows the essence really knows the thing as to what it is and by knowing what it is not' Aristotle, Book Beta, Metaphysics, p. 61

 

Objective

 

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the terms for ‘tree’ in two different but related languages, Ka’apor or Urubu-Ka'apor (henceforth, Ka'apor) and Mbya-Guarani (henceforth, Mbya), are truly cognate in having the same intensional meanings. The Ka’apor speak a Tupí-Guaraní language in eastern Amazonian Brazil. They number about 1600 persons living in 12 villages across an expanse of about one-half million hectares of forest. The Mbya of Misiones Province, Argentina also speak a Tupí-Guaraní language. They have a population of 4,083 persons (INDEC 2005) in Misiones Province, Argentina  alone; they  are also found in six Brazilian states as well as adjoining Paraguay (Jensen 1999) for a total population of about 20,000 (Assis and Garlet 2004). The Tupí-Guaraní family is divided into eight subgroups. Ka’aor is in subgroup 8 and Mbya is in subgroup 1 (Jensen 1999).

 

map 1

Figure 1: Map 1

 

Dimensions of Contrast


The ethnobiological label 'tree' is basic to the folk labeling of the plant domain in the world’s languages (Berlin et al. 1973, 1974; Brown 1984; Atran 1990; Berlin 1992; Witkowski and  Brown 1980). At its most basic, it is a 'brute' fact, as opposed to an 'institutional' fact (Searle 1995, cited in Viveiros de Castro 2004, 13); rather, one could make the argument that trees are first of all nature not culture (see Viveiros de Castro 2004, 13). Linguistically, the term for tree in various languages is never marked. 'Tree' terms are semantic 'primitives' in the terminology of Friedrich (1970, 8). The basic notion of primitiveness of the concept is summed up in the Neolithic experience of people having had to deal hands-on with trees, and their physicality: 'To a Proto-Indo-European hewing down a tree with a stone ax, the physical differences between an elm and a linden, or even an English and a live oak, would be obvious—often painfully so. He would tend to symbolize these differences, in words, probably roots . . .' (Friedrich 1970, 8). Folk botanical classification as we know it today is essentially unthinkable without a life form category 'tree' because all languages have the concept, though this may not always have been the case (Witkowski et al. 1981), for 'tree' as a life form label may be a relatively recent development from 'wood.'
In any event, according to Brown and  Witkowski (1980), the world’s languages do not encode any ethnobotanical system that does not first incorporate a life form ‘tree.’ After that, if a system has only two life forms, these would be 'tree' and 'grerb' (Brown and  Witkowski 1980, 366). Brown (1984, 114) captured the 'tree' concept, in terms of size, in stating 'tree is clearly the most distinctive primarily because it encompasses the largest and, hence, the most conspicuous plants in an environment. As a consequence of its exceptional natural salience, tree is unmarked vis-à-vis all other plant life-form classes' (boldface in original). Grerb is an invented term that denotes a small, mainly green, herbaceous and nonwoody plant. It is a term designed to cover indigenous words used to contrast with tree. After grerb, the world’s languages encode terms equivalent or roughly equivalent to bush, vine, and grass (Brown and Witkowski 1980, 366; cf. Brown 1984). Brown and  Witkowski (1980) define tree essentially in a dialectical mode, emphasizing how it contrasts with grerb. The dimension of contrast, or what are oppositional characteristics, includes height, width, depth, and density. The poles of contrast along these dimensions, therefore, are tall vs. short, wide vs. narrow, deep vs. shallow, and hard vs. soft. These are the adjectival oppositions in terms of tree vs. grerb that for Brown and  Witkowski (1980, 367) essentially encompass the contrasts in a  deductive way.

 

In terms of height alone, as an example, Brown and  Witkowski (1980, 367) note that the Delaware language instantiates an adult human being as the touchstone by which to differentiate tree from grerb. A plant taller than an adult human is a tree; one smaller is a grerb. Perhaps more interesting is the universal linguistic observation noted by Joseph Greenberg (1975, 90, cited in Brown and  Witkowski 1980, 361), regarding the zero-to-infinity principle. The relevance of this is to 'grerb' terms being marked and 'tree' terms being unmarked. By zero-to-infinity, we refer to the fact that along the contrast dimensions such as tall vs. short, wide vs. narrow, deep vs. shallow, and hard vs. soft, the marked item of the adjectival oppositional pair will be coupled to the zero point of the pertinent dimension, whereas the item that is unmarked will be connected to the 'infinite' end of the dimension. The unmarked term is primary and precedes in its psychological salience the marked term in representation of the entire domain, as Greenberg (1975, 90) noted on the question of antonymous pairs of such adjectives: 'When the opposition is neutralized in such expressions as 'How wide is it?' or 'What is its width' the first member of each pair stands for the category as a whole.' 


The dimension of most substantive opposition in tree vs. grerb, of course, is size. The relevant adjectival opposition, therefore, could be summed up in terms of large vs. small (Brown and  Witkowski 1980, 369; also see Tudge 2006, 6). Trees are simply big from a linguistic and philosophical perspective. Size is important as a feature for it allows for recursiveness. An archetypical tree, that is, one that is not a dwarf or otherwise aberrant, is in its mature stages undergoing multiple iterations of an underlying genetic pattern, mutatis mutandis, given environmental contingencies, that involve repetition of branches, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, and so on, continuously. This premise of recursiveness of the tree, unlike more diminutive organisms such as self-limited grerbs, is evident on top of an established structure that continues to add height to its overall dimensions (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 159-60). Apart from the underlying philosophical premise of trees as 'big,' however, one can, in fact, argue statistically that trees are big from a physical and material perspective, one that is simultaneously rooted in the two languages and two forests of this study. Such an argument, if proven, is prima facie evidence in support of the linguistic and deductive axioms of treeness. Bigness vs. smallness of trees is in fact a dimension that tends to encompass several of the others already mentioned, including tall vs. short, wide vs. narrow, and hard vs. soft in the domain of plants. We will see also that this deductive intuition appears to be a good fit with Ka’apor and Mbya freelisting data concerning the cognitive parameters of the life form label ‘tree’ in their two languages, respectively.

 

Trees and Psychological Reality


Do 'trees' as a life form taxon have psychological reality in these languages, or any languages for that matter? The question may be posed in a way parallel to though not in exactly the same way as to whether the taxa of science have validity qua science, not psychology. The beautiful, rare gastropod called Junonia (Scaphella junonia) is sometimes called the pride of Sanibel Island, Florida, which is one of the showcase shell-collecting Meccas of the world, and were an out-of-towner to find one, s/he may well end up in a major feature in the local newspaper. Junonia is also found offshore in deep water from the Carolinas to Texas (Abbott 1984, 9). That gastropod has psychological reality to malacologists, perhaps some other zoologists, and certainly shell enthusiasts, but not really to anyone else. Junonia is a 'real' entity when defined by standard biological criteria, also, including sexual reproduction and closure as a species (Steussy 1990, 208). A problem with these criteria, of course, is they do not hold in all cases. Often botanical families seem less real than species in general (Steussy 1990, 208). On the other hand, occasionally certain families, such as mints (Labiatae) and carrots (Umbelliferae), which have been recognized since Theophrastus (BC 370-285) as being real, seem to be more so than their segregates (Steussy 1990, 208). The same is arguably the case for palms, where the concept of the genus is 'nebulous' (Henderson 1995, 21) but the reality of the family is undeniable. In this regard, the dendrological approach can be most useful, even laudatory, as the reality of wood, leaves, branches, and architecture of large groupings of organisms seems to transcend smaller groupings; splitters would tend to approve of the approach we take here, and agree with the notion that 'generic concepts have been more or less at the whim of particular taxonomists' (Gentry 1993, 1).Yet to not recognize scientific taxa above the level of the individual organism but beneath that of the family and genus,  as we have argued (Balée and  Moore 1991, 216-17), seems to be an exercise in futility, since clear groupings of organisms can be detected in nature even if taxonomic concepts themselves are not fully airtight due to hybridization and apomixes (Steussy 1990, 208).


Balée and  Moore (1991, 216) were taken to task for arguing that plant species in their sample of five Tupí-Guaraní languages being compared were natural units, not products of mind. For purposes of understanding such comparison of plant names. Françoise Grenand (1995, 37) stated, by way of critique:

'Botanical species, even those defined by the logic of an extinct and supposedly neutral language [i.e., Latin] are still the product of a classificatory concept that came from the human brain. . .'1

 

 

 

 

 

Balée would not disagree with that correction today, but merely at this point we would add that one needs both the science of systematic botany, however flawed, as well as the cognitive sciences, however imperfect, in order to construct better a descriptive model of linguistic and cognitive reality, to account for how people actually understand the landscapes they live in, and in some cases the landscapes they and their ancestors have created. We cannot escape our nature, which is not to say we are automatons, though to to some extent we are biased by our enculturation. Everyone has contingent pasts that have influenced their perception and classification of the landscape as well as the flora and fauna that make it up. People act as individuals in the environment but only within the constraints given by history and the group they originate in, even if they are people moving between different cultural loci.

 

We can, in fact, therefore concur with Grenand’s (1995, 37-38) next statement fully:

The synchronic comparison among languages or even the diachronic study of different stages of a single language puts into play scales of time and of space.  Whereas the former allows one to understand survival of ancient behaviors, the remainder of an extinct social condition, the latter offers proof of the effects of intercultural contact, of the proximity or, in contrast, of the distance between human groups.2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time and space—the raw material of historical ecology—do in fact influence what the landscape consists of. It is the landscape in the final analysis that holds the key to understanding the flora and fauna available to local human populations. These are the organisms, in principle, that local populations name and classify, not others (Berlin et al. 1973, Berlin 1992; Balée 2003). The rules of ethnobiological classification are general, but the flora and fauna that fall under any classification are ultimately local, and these contingent factors influence the definitional attributes of the taxa that are included in ethnobiological categories.


Let us return to Françoise Grenand’s problem concerning the categorical reality of species. The question is phenomenological in integrative biology and one cannot escape it. Problematically, individual organisms of too many species manage to breed with other organisms of other species successfully, and these species are not just frogs! Hybrids among trees are well known among oaks, poplars, and willows. In England, and throughout temperate cities, one sees the hybrid London plane tree (Plantanus x acerifolia). Reputedly, it is a cross between the American sycamore (Plantanus occidentalis) and the Oriental plane tree (Plantanus orientalis), which hybridized in the Botanic Garden of Oxford University in the 1600s (Tudge 2006, 11). A vast number of domesticates and weeds, moreover, are hybrids, and many of these cannot reproduce by sexual methods because of a lack of matching chromosome pairs in the parental generation.

 

Questions of what constitute a species continue to be relevant to the broader though purely dendrological question of what is a tree if only because answers, in both cases, involve hedging and ambiguity. Trees have the essence of life: they are what Aristotle called 'perishable sensible substances' as opposed to 'eternal sensible substances' and 'unchangeable substances' (Aristotle 1998, 3). They are finite, limited, and transitory, as is life itself. If for scientific species it is well enough to point out that 'No biological concept is absolute; hence imperfections in viewing species as real must be tolerated. . .' (Stuessy 1990, 167), it is equally germane, though somewhat logically, in terms of its derivation different, to observe, as does Tudge (2006, 6), that, 'A tree is a big plant with a stick up the middle—or could be if it grew in the right circumstances; or is very closely related to other plants that are big and have a stick up the middle; or resembles a big plant with a stick up the middle' (emphasis added). Even if it were an aberrant tree, a broken tree, a bonsai or a dwarf, or tree that otherwise might have grown tall in the open sun but for contingency reasons did not (Tudge 2006), it is still a tree.


Using the same definitional logic, whereas a 'fake gun' is not a gun, a 'black gun' is a gun and so too are a 'broken gun' and an 'inoperable gun' because by criteria that defines a 'gun,' these examples have the relevant motor activity properties or they were 'originally . . . made to function like a gun' (Lakoff and  Johnson 1980, 121). In the same way, the aberrant tree that did not reach the proper treelike height is still a tree because it was originally supposed to be a tree by the logic of natural selection, most of the time. However odd in its particular life circumstances, a tree is a living thing and makes up part of an extenuated life form, usually identified in natural languages with some notion of prototypicality (Rosch 1978).  By this, we specifically mean trees of high psychological salience, to be defined below.


Our data are from two languages, Ka’apor and Mbya. Although they are related by common membership in the same language family, these two languages are nevertheless different by fundamental subgroup criteria (Jensen 1999). They are also similar in terms of being historically located within Neotropical forest contexts, yet different by other temporal and spatial criteria. In terms of temporal criteria, one can expect the two languages to have experienced a deep wedge of time differentiation from the parent language, Proto-Tupí-Guaraní, because each is in a different recognized subgroup of Tupí-Guaraní (Mbya in subgroup 1, Ka’apor in subgroup 8) and they are far apart spatially (see Map 1).

 

In terms of spatial criteria, moreover, the two languages have interacted with fundamentally different Neotropical forests, the Ka’apor, on the one hand, have been since the late 19th century associated with pre-Amazonian (or Amazonian Maranhão) forests which are essentially similar to other forests of eastern Amazonia east of the Tocantins River (Balée 1994, 35-9) with a few exceptions. The Mbya in our sample have historically inhabited a subtype of Atlantic Coastal Forest called Selva Paranaense of Eastern Paraguay, Northern Argentina, and Southwestern Brazil which, although it shares many genera with Amazonia, shares few species with that region (Mori et al. 1983). The occupation of forests in Misiones Province by Guaraní-speaking people is firmly dated at 1200 years ago and 900 years ago in the Uruguay River basin, with likely occupation in the area dating from 2,000 years ago (Noelli 2004, 32). Both groups in this study, the Ka'apor and Mbya, are intimately familiar, and over a long time period, with the forests they inhabit, and with the trees that occur in these forests. So in terms of space-time, or more generally, in terms of historical ecology, one can speak of controlled comparison in the domain of trees with regard to the Mbya and the Ka’apor, assuming we have a parallel concept to begin with, namely, that of 'tree.' Of course, if we begin with ethnobiological theory, and the deductive approach therein (as in Berlin 1990), we can assume from the outset that Mbya yvyra and Ka’apor myrá are cognate tree terms, or at least, are simply independent 'tree' terms.

 

Trees and Aestheticism

 

Are trees really 'trees,' and do all persons see 'trees' as such? Are trees in essence big plants only? Recall that trees are 'brute' not 'institutional' facts (Searle 1995, cited in Viveiros de Castro 2004). On the other hand, some individuals would not see the trees for the flowers, so to speak. In other words, what evokes the plant world is not so much the distinction of bigness vs. smallness (treeness vs. grerbness) at the life form level, but rather, beauty vs. drabness. The renowned painter Margaret Mee had an eye for not the largest trees of the pre-Amazonian forest, when she visited the Ka’apor Indians in 1956, but rather for the 'pink and white blooms of Gustavia augusta . . .' (Mee 1988, 36) [called jeniparana in Portuguese], a striking zygomorphic flower of a ' small tree of old fallows and swamp forests' (Balée 1994, 291, emphasis added). Perhaps Mee’s aesthetic, even exquisitely enchanted notion of the forests of Amazonia derives not from the trees it harbors, but from the flowers. This is not so far phenomenologically from some indigenous thought Balée collected in 2003 from one of the informants later used in the present study of freelisting, in 2008. The informant, a married female of about 60 years of age in 2008, upon being asked what she thought about the end of the land invasion of the Ka’apor reserve by loggers that had recently been resolved, replied that she regretted the loss of the purple flowers from Tabebuia impetiginosa, known as tajy or tajy-te in Ka’apor (called ipé roxo or pau d'arco roxo in Brazil). By Smith’s s, tajy is the most psychologically salient tree in Ka’apor culture (see below). At the peak of the dry season, in September, tajy trees, which are one of the few deciduous trees of the forest, come into full purplish flower. As they fall, they cover the green forest floor under the parent tree with a majestic purple carpet and the winged seeds left on the branches are eventually blown by the wind to distant open fields where they may germinate. It is a volunteer species, and is a characteristic presence in fallow forests, where indigenous societies had villages and gardens in the distant past (Balée 1994). At the same time, it is a valuable timber species. In Paraguay and Argentina, its close relative, also with purple flowers, Tabebuia heptaphylla (called lapacho negro or lapacho rosado in Spanish), was driven to near extinction by the logging industry in the 1970s (Torres et al. 1989, 56). Both species qualify both as ‘big’ and as 'beautiful', depending on perspective.

 

So is a tree, in its Aristotelian essence, an aesthetic or physical concept? What kind of a thing is it? If physical, it would logically need to have quantitative, objective, third-personal qualities as opposed to qualitative, subjective, first personal or immaterial attributes (Searle 2004, 116). A tree would have to present with a capacity for causality in order to have psychological reality in a universal, physical sense. Ghosts and rainbows (which are not material arches in the sky) lack that capacity because they are not quantifiable and causal, in contrast to solidity and liquidity (Searle 2004, 117). In that sense, trees, as physical objects that are big, wide, deep, and hard, take on aspects of reality and objectivity (Searle 2004), though they do not necessarily discard things like spirituality, magic, beauty, and immateriality.


We do not need merely to assume that trees exist by deduction, however, for we can prove that assumption now with freelisting data to be shown below. Still we have not shown all the potential exceptions to the taxon 'tree' that might exist in any given ethnobiological system of classification. What does one do with immature individuals? Living seeds, monocotyledons and dicotyledons of trees, upon germination can become growing tree seedlings of often shorter and in some cases less lignaceous trees than many mature grerbs. Does that make these individuals any less treelike? One can answer this by referencing indigenous languages that explicitly distinguish juvenile specimens from parent material. The Ka’apor do refer to tree seedlings, the 'young' adult, as the ta’yr of the plant, and to the seeds as ha’ĩ ‘seeds.’ They observe plants grow from seedling to adult individual in swiddens and in the forest, so obviously they see all life stages of a plant, unlike taxonomic botanists. The late New York Botanical Garden botanist Rupert Barneby expressed admiration to Balée about this, when saying he could not identify seedlings of Cecropia spp., so different were they from the mature specimens ordinarily pressed and submitted to herbaria for identification by professional botanists. These immature individuals had been collected as part of an inventory of the forest floor. These were real specimens, though they had not yet entered into scientific classification, nor would they. There was nothing to compare them to.

 

Trees, Polysemy, and Perspectivism


Trees could be non-trees through their polysemic status, a widely noted feature of life form labels (Berlin et al. 1973, Randall and  Hunn 1982, 837-38; Atran 1985; Balée 1994, 179). In Ka’apor, myra ('tree,' provisionally) also means 'wood'3 and numerous finished wood products (Balée 1989, 6), such as stick, cane, rifle stock, pole. In the Mbya language, yvyra likewise denotes wood, stick, pole, and sundry related terms.


What came first—'tree' for trees in the forest, or 'tree' for cultural products? Although to answer this directly introduces tautology, perhaps it cannot be helped—it’s an example of an ineluctable imperfection in ethnobiological reasoning, as with inescapable flaws in integrative biology by a similar logic. The term 'tree' in a deductive, all purpose sense (Balée 1989) precedes these various cultural derivations because its scope of meaning at the next, descending rank (folk generic) is nothing less than vast (at least in Greater Amazonia) in reference to biological—not cultural—taxa, as we will see, and has already to some extent been demonstrated elsewhere (Balée 1989, 1994, Balée and  Moore 1991). Finally, ‘trees’ might be other than what they seem.


If one adopts the 'multinatural' relativity of perspectivism as it has been used in reference to Amazonia (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004), not all beings are what they seem. Some living things are dynamic, and change form. Nothing in fact is what it seems, and all appearances are undergoing transformations into something else that escape definitional essences and congealed concepts. If humans drink manioc beer, jaguars drink human blood; when humans drink human blood, as in exocannibalistic feasts, they are (or become) jaguars. It bespeaks an underlying shamanic principle widespread in lowland South American thought, if not elsewhere in egalitarian societies. It cannot elude the sensitive reader who refuses to impose rigid Western naturalism onto what are essentially what Viveiros de Castro (2004) has sagaciously identified as multinatural categories of indigenous South American thought. In many cases, real creatures acquire human qualities while other human groups are conceptualized in animal terms. Some animals take on transitional forms (shape-shifting) (Slater 1994; Descola 1996; Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004; Balée 2003). Many such transformations, as from noble human to white-lipped peccary among the Wari’ peope of Western Amazonia (Conklin 2001), denote animal/human associations, not plant/animal associations. Yet plant/human associations are clearly known from the region.


The Mbya believe that all trees have a soul. The notion may be unique in lowland South America. In Mbya culture, the essential religious concept is the word of the soul ' ñe’ê ' which means 'soul-word.' In addition to having a soul, some trees also have a powerful, purifying power.  Ñe’ êry  means the 'flowing soul-word.'  Yvyra ñe’ êry, hence, are 'trees of the soul-word' (Cadogan 1970, 26); the concept here is that the soul flows out of these trees. They are the most sacred of trees (Cadogan 1992). The Mbya profess a belief in the sacredness of these species such that, in general, they must not be cut down or scored or cut or harmed in any way; the exception is the tropical cedar tree (see below), which is used in construction of the prayer house and in religious instruments also. They say these trees 'drip' or 'leak' because during a short period of time during the austral spring, they exude watery droplets that soak the ground beneath their vast canopies. The Mbya informants with whom the data were gathered explain that when this occurs, the drops of liquid that fall from the leaves' drip tips form part of the soul of these trees, saying that the soul 'climbs up and spills over' (Cebolla Badie 2005). This 'water' is considered medicinal, analogous to holy water but more so, and in an indigenous way. The Mbya who rub their heads with the droplets of these sacred liquids claim to feel refreshed from the experience.


This mysticism that surrounds yvyra  ñe’ery 'the trees of the flowing soul-word' is not easy information to gather, for Mbya people do not wish to discuss it. According to their pioneer ethnographer, Cadogan, the profound religious connotations of this phenomenon are based on the Mbya belief that the origin of life is tied to the morning mist, fog, and water. In the bowels of the earth one is supposed to find the eternal waters that surge to the surface in the form of sacred springs, in one of which appeared Ñande Jaryi (literally, 'our grandmother') the sacred founding grandmother of the Mbya, the mother of the solar hero Kuaray (Cadogan 1992) who, for his part, is a close associate of solar heroes found in Ka’apor mythology also, such as Maír (the name for the sun, incidentally, is Warahy, a cognate term evidently with the Mbya term).

 

Principal among these sacred trees of the yvyra  ñe’ery 'the trees of the flowing soul-word' word is ygary, the tropical cedar tree (Cedrela fissilis), which is considered to be one that helped bring into being the original morning mist, and hence, is believed to be fundamental to the continuation of the forest and human life on earth as we know it4 :

 

 'In the first earth, Yvy tenonde, Kuaray, Pa Pa Mirî(a minor divinity in the Mbya pantheon), Pa, Pa, Tenondegua came to verify the earth. The first tree...[originated] from a little stick with leaves From this stick they planted the ygary (cedar)1 to transform it in a tree. In the second place, they planted aju'y atâ’i2 and then aju'y chî3 . It was only these three trees that Ñande Ru Pa Pa Tenonde4 raised up. And from the flowers of these three trees the forest was created. Those were what Ñande Ru Tenonde raised up for first time' (Cebolla Badie 2005).
Cedar tree (Cedrela fissilis).
2 Laurel tree (Laureaceae).
3 White laurel tree (Ocotea acutifolia).
4 Our father last-last first, the main divinity that is also termed Pa Pa Tenondegua and Ñande Ru Tenonde..

 

Another important tree in a Mbya-religious sense is the laurel, or Lauraceae family of trees in general. The concept of strength and hardness is called forth in this description of the indigenous concept of the tree at the mythical beginning of time: "Aju’y or laurel [conjures up] . . .an image of the indestructible column of wood created to support the earth; most [Mbya] say it is a miraculous tree created at the same time as the ygary or cedar” (Cadogan 1970, 23).

 

Trees as Ancestors


The Ka’apor believe their ancestors came from a tree—tajy. Although the concept of people being descended from animals is perhaps more commonly acceptable in the totemic contexts, plants are not exactly inanimate but rather somewhere in between animate and inanimate (Reed 1988, 112) and modeling of human  kinship principles on them is not inconceivable (e.g., Schuster and  Carpenter 1996, 14-17). Tajy refers mainly to Tabebuia impetiginosa, the tree with the beautiful purple flowers. The Kuikuro people of the Upper Xingu basin, a Carib speaking society, ascribe spiritual value to ueŋgïfi wood (called kuarup wood in the Kamayurá language) from which founding ancestors, one of whom was the mother of the sun and the moon and wife to the ancestral Jaguar Chief, are believed to have been made by the culture hero, Kwantingï (Carneiro 1993, 428; Heckenberger 2007, 291). A similar origin of the sun and moon is told by the Kalapalo people, a closely related Carib society of the Upper Xingu (Basso 1987, 23-81), wherein the hero Kwantïngï creates women from wood to give to the primordial Black Jaguar instead of giving him his own daughters, which in turn would lead to the births of the sun and the moon from one of them. The Kamayurá, a Tupí-Guaraní society also of the Upper Xingu, also consider kuarup wood to have been human ancestral material once; in both cases, Kamayurá and Kuikuru, the wood is used in graveposts underground, suggestive of its strength, though the species is not given in these sources. Tabebuia is also hard in its wood, as the Ka’apor claim their ancestors to have been: hardy people, more impervious and sturdy than they are today (Balée 1994, 7-8). Its heartwood is used to make bows throughout the Amazon basin and its local Portuguese name, pau d'arco, reflects this usage.


Ka'apor informants claimed their ancestors were different from the ancestors of other groups, such as whites and the Guajá hunter-gatherers, who were derived from softer trees. Tajy is perhaps not coincidentally the most psychologically salient tree species of the Ka’apor in terms of freelisting as reported herein. Another way of saying this is that tajy is, in some way, a prototypical tree. The question for this analyis remains, is its prototypicality due to its beauty (the beauty and showiness of its flowers), hardness, height, ancestral-hood, totemic value, or spirituality?

Data from Two Languages, Two Forests


We collected freelisting data from two indigenous societies, the Mbya and the Ka'apor. Freelisting is a procedure well suited to the collection of ethnobotanical data, which is fairly restricted as to the definition of the domain (Quinlan 2005), though the amount of data in a tropical or even subtropical setting, such as Selva Paranaense, can be vast. Twenty adult Mbya—ten males and ten females—participated in the exercise. The Mbya were all located in a single settlement in the area of the community of Jejy, which is located in the biosphere reserve of Yabotí (Reserva de Biosfera Yabotí) in the northeast of Misiones Province, Guaraní Department, Argentina.  The study was conducted in July 2007 and all data were collected in and around the settlement of Jejy. The Ka'apor in the sample were located in three different settlements. Twenty-four adult Ka'apor participated; they were 18 males and 6 females. The Ka'apor data were collected over a five-day period in August 2008 in a bus station in Santa Maria do Pará, in the settlement of Ximo-Rená, and in the settlement of Xie-pihun.


The procedure was fairly open ended. In both languages, each person was interviewed separately. Each was asked in his/her language, 'Name all the trees you know in your language (in the human language).' In Ka'apor, the question is: ' Eme'u ihe˜ pe upa myra rer nde ukwaha nde pe.' (Tell me all the tree names you know).
In Mbya the question was the same and stated as: ' Eme’ ê chevy pave yvyra kuéry réra eikuaavy.'5

 

Balée speaks competent Ka'apor and Cebolla Badie speaks competent Mbya and thus we were able to translate adequately this question into these field languages. The answers, these being the tree names each informant provided, were recorded as the informants spoke them. These were phonetic renderings that we later transcribed phonemically. Both languages have been phonemicized; in the tables, appendixes, and all text renderings of Mbya and Ka'apor terms herein, we use a consistent phonemicized orthography for both. The Mbya orthography, incidentally, shows morpheme boundaries, which is standard practice; the Ka'apor ethnography used here does not show these boundaries.

 

Independence of response was maintained with each informant. The data were not 'contaminated' by preserving this aspect of the procedure (Quinlan 2005). The informants did not get 'help' from others. The interviewers did not prompt them with hints, or requests to give more names and so on. The interviews tended to run about 20-35  minutes each. The data were 'cleaned' up in terms of elimination of effects of free variation, dialect, idiolect and other sorts of obstacles to obtaining a clean list. We did not eliminate, however, sub-taxa. if an individual gave a folk generic name and several folk species of the same folk generic, all were included as separate entries, or 'names.' For example, an individual saying tajy-te, tajy-pihun, and tajy-tawa would have had all his/her entries recorded separately, even though these are all folk species of the same generic, tajy, which could have been entered separately also. This is widely considered to be one of the limitations of the method (Borgatti 1992), but our interest is not in determining exactly what items to exclude and which informants would be best for further exploration of a domain called 'tree.' Rather, our objective is comparison of the domain myra and yvyra in the two languages respectively. For that purpose, freelisting is an ideal way of determining the order of importance of items, regardless of their status inside folk-ordered hierarchies of ethnobiological classification, which again is not the objective of the analysis here.


The method of freelisting is based on the principle that the more culturally important or psychologically salient an item is, the higher on an individual’s list that item will tend to be found. The concept is similar to Zipf’s law (Zipf 1949), which holds that the frequency of usage of a word is inversely proportional to its length—in other words, commonly used words, presumably of high psychological salience (that is, those readily accessible in common speech), tend to be shorter than infrequently used words. Ethnographers had earlier found that when Americans freelist kin terms, the word 'mother' occurs about 97% of the time as the first item (Romney and  D’Andrade 1964). Ranking of an item across different informants' (or respondents') lists is one factor in determining psychological salience across different minds in the same culture. Its frequency of appearance is another factor. 'Mother' on a list of English kin terms is likely to be on nearly everyone’s list, for kinship is not a large semantic domain (there are not a great many words in it) and motherhood is arguably an important status of personhood in Anglophone society, regardless of which one. In contrast, plant terms or, in a tropical forest, tree terms, have the potential to be unwieldy domains with a multitude of words. Ethnographer Jerry Smith (1993) introduced a method for weighting both rank and frequency of an item, in order to come up with an index of salience, now called Smith’s s. An individual salience of an item would be as follows:

 

Sj = 1- (rj ٪ li)

 

where Sj is the psychological salience of item j, rj is the rank of item j on the individual’s list, and li is the length of the individual’s list. If a person listed 20 tree names and ' tajy ' was 4th on the list, the rank of tajy would be 1 - (4 ٪  20) = 1 - (.2) = .8. An item cannot have a psychological salience higher than 1.0. In order to determine the rank of any item j across a group of 20 informants, one simply sums the total psychological salience of all informants’ responses and then divides by the number of respondents (20 in the Mbya case, 24 in the Ka’apor case). If tajy (Tabebuia sp.) does not occur on a list, it’s salience is defined as 1 minus the total number of items divided by the total number of items (giving a zero).

 

Table 1. The Ten Most Salient Folk Tree Taxa in Ka'apor by Smith's s

Rank Folk Taxon Species Smith's s Coll. no. series Balée
1.         tajy                 Tabebuia spp.                                                0.775               4349

2.         parawa'y         Eschweilera spp.                             0.718               0010,0920,1072,
3031,4083,4308

3.         tajypo             Tabebuia spp.                                0.635               2189,4182

4          yrykywa'y        Manilkara huberi                             0.474               2926

5.         tareka'y          Bagassa guianensis                          0.467               2298

6.         akaju'y           Anacardium spp.                             0.437               2282,0301

7.         jetai'y             Hymenaea parvifolia                        0.408               0880

8.         jaxiamyr         Lecythis idatimon                             0.398               0037

9.         tarapai'y         Hymenaea spp.                               0.389               1000,4158

10        yrapitang       Brosimum rubescens                         0.356              0957

 

Because Smith’s s incorporates the average both of order and frequency of items on lists, an item listed second on everyone s list would have a higher salience than the first item people listed if that item was different in all cases but everyone had the same item listed in second place. In the case of the trees, the 20 Mbya informants listed 135 different names of yvyra 'trees'and the 24 Ka’apor informants listed 290 names of myra 'trees' in 20-35 minutes each. The large difference of aggregate numbers of the total list lengths (290 vs. 135) is no doubt due to differences in species diversity of the two areas, with pre-Amazonian Maranhão simply being of greater tree species diversity than Selva Paranaense, at least in the area of Misiones, a fact due to a host of environmental gradients. The least salient items are those listed lowest on individual lists and lowest on the longest individual lists.

 

Table 2. The Ten Most Salient Folk Tree Taxa in Mbyá by Smith's s

Rank Folk Taxon Species Smith's s (Coll. no. series Balée & Cebolla)
1.         yvyra-pytã                  Peltophorum dubium                    0.568               --
2.         yvyra-pere                 Apuleia leiocarpa                          0.537               --        
3.         kurupa’y                    Anadenanthera colubrina              0.435               B&C 5305
4.         guavira                     Campomanesia xanthocarpa          0.423               B&C 53023.   
5.         ygary                        Cedrela fissilis                              0.386               --        
6.         aju’y                          Lauraceae (various)                     0.378               --
7.         yvyra-apyte-pytã        Cabralea cangerana                      0.363               --
8          guaporoity                 Plinia rivularis                              0.362               B&C 5308
9          yvyra kachĩ                Longchocarpus leucanthus            0.356       --
10        guajayvi                    Patagonula americana                   0.343               B&C 5311

 

These included terms in Mbya such as guembe (an epiphyte) [no. 134, Appendix 2] for the Ka’apor terms such as kwere’ĩ (a spiny, small palm) [no. 290, Appendix 1]. The status of these terms as trees, therefore, is questionable clearly in a quantitative sense though it is not our objective in this analysis to reject such terms, only to question their salience as prototypes. We might consider these to be not trees were further tests, such as triad tests and consensus analysis, to be carried out systematically in the population, but that is not the issue here. We are specifically concerned with whether psychological salience actually matches or not the physical reality of the forest and the trees.

 

Psychological Salience and Dominant Trees in the Forest


The results of freelisting exercises are found in Appendixes 1 and 2, respectively, of the Ka’apor and Mbya data, showing the rank by Smith’s s, the Ka’apor or Mbya taxon, and the associated scientific taxon or taxa.6 Tables 1 and 2 show, respectively, the top ten most psychologically salient tree taxa in the Ka’apor and Mbya languages, respectively, with their S values together with rank, folk taxon, and scientific taxon. All data analysis for this article was conducted using ANTHROPAC 4.983/x (© Analytic Technologies 1992). Although ten is an arbitrary number, we are using the top ten folk taxa of trees as the psychologically most salient members of the respective categories myra and yvyra, that is, 'trees,' in Ka'apor and Mbya, respectively. We did not incorporate, as noted above, triads and consensus analysis in our study; merely, we have begun to evaluate the comparative aspects of freelisting of an entire domain. It can be argued that the top items are the most psychologically salient based on Smith's s (Borgatti 1992; Quinlan 2005). Indeed, we would argue that these top ten, or some other high-level arbitrary figure in relation to the long lists of species given in Appendixes 1 and 2 (290 folk taxa for the Ka'apor, 135 in Mbya) represent the prototypes of  the category 'tree' in the two languages. 'Prototypes . . . contain the attributes most representative of items inside and least representative of items outside the category' (Rosch 1978, 30).  Table 3 shows specifically the range of meaning of each Ka’apor term from Table 1, for the Ka’apor terms have been more amply collected by us than the Mbya.

 

Table 3. Ranges of Meaning of the top ten folk terms in Ka'apor

Rank by Smith's s Folk taxon Species
1.            tajy                  Tabebuia impetiginosa
2.            parawa'y         Eschweilera amazonica, E. apiculata, E. coriacea, E. micrantha,  E. obversa,
                                    E. ovata, E.pedicellata
3.            tajypo             Tabebuia serratifolia, Tabebuia sp. 1
4.            yrykywa'y        Manilkara huberi, M. bidentata ssp. surinamensis
5.            tareka'y          Bagassa guianensis
6.            akaju'y           Anacardium giganteum, A. parvifolium
7.            jetai'y             Hymenaea parvifolia
8.            jaxiamyr         Lecythis idatimon

9.           tarapai'y          Hymenaea courbaril, H. reticulata
10.         rapytã'y          Brosimum rubescens

Total No. Terminal Scientific Taxa    =          20

 

It is Table 4, however, that shows the exact relationship between the philosophical concept of 'treeness' and how it relates to the indigenous concept as well as the forest itself. Table 4 shows the basal area, or square meters of area, occupied by each folk taxon from eight hectares of inventoried forest in the pre-Amazonian forest of the Ka’apor habitat in extreme eastern Amazonian Brazil, carried out by Balée in the 1980s and 1990s and reported in appendixes 1 and 3 of Balée (1994). The relative basal area of a species is called its dominance. A dominant tree species, in other words, is a tree that occupies a lot more area than it would if it were randomly distributed in relation to other trees, or if it were of random size. The total basal area of the top ten folk taxa of trees of the Ka’apor by Smith’s s, which in fact are 20 tree species (see Table 3), adds up to 40.2666 m2. The total basal area of all taxa collected on all eight hectares of pre-Amazonian forest was 214.1755 m2. The total number of botanical (scientific) species on these eight hectares in the sample was 589. This means that what the basal area for a species should be if basal area per species is randomly distributed is: 214.1755 ∕589 = .3636256366723 m2 . Instead, however, the analysis of our data shows that for the 20 species of trees denoted by the ten most psychologically salient tree taxa (determined by freelisting) in Ka’apor, the mean basal area per tree species is 40.2666/20=2.01333. This means that we have a group of species in these top ten folk taxa (namely the 20 botanical species) that are occupying 5.5 times more basal area than they should had size been left to chance. In other words, psychologically salient trees are statistically, in part, 'big,' and this is not an accident. Bigness in a statistical, ecological sense is cognitively incorporated into the indigenous concept of treeness in Ka’apor and, by extension, in Mbya, as one can determine from the large trees at the top of the Mbya list.

 

Table 4. Total basal area of top ten Ka'apor 'tree' taxa in 8 hectares of high forest and old fallow forest in Pre-Amazonia (inferred from appendixes 1 & 3 of Balée 1994)

Rank by Smith's s Folk Taxon Total Basal Area Occupied on 8 Hectares (m2)
1.          tajy                 1.7787
2           parawa'y         24.9057
3.          tajypo             2.2746
4.          yrykywa'y        .7402
5.          tareka'y           3.2134
6.          akaju'y            1.7491
7.          jetai'y              1.2164
8.          jaxiamyr          4.2865
9.         tarapai'y          .1018
10.       yrapytã'y          0*

Total Basal area of top ten folk taxa on 8 ha:          40.2666 m2

Total Basal area of all taxa on 8 ha:                       214.1755 m2

Total Number of Scientific Taxa denoted by 10 folk taxa:  20
Total Number of all taxa on 8 ha:                                   589

 

Interpretation: The above means that the average basal area per species should be, if basal area is randomly distributed:

 

 214.1755 m2 ÷ 589 = .3636256366723 m2 

 

Instead, as regards the 20 species found named by ten most psychologically salient 'tree' taxa, we have:


40.2666 m2 ÷ 20 = 2.01333 m2, or  rather a group of species occupying 5.5 times more basal area than they should had their size been left to chance.

 

*The plant Brosimum rubescens did not occur on any of the inventory plots sampled.

Discusion


Although we cannot comment directly on the basal area of folk taxa at the top of the Mbya list as we can with the Ka’apor list of folk taxa, it does seem similar from the perspective of size of individual taxa as known from taxonomic botany that one is not merely dealing with organisms for their aesthetic, spiritual, and other immaterial values but rather for their sheer physicality. The evidence that bigness is an essential part of the definition of 'tree' in Ka’apor myra and Mbya yvyra is seen in the top ten trees on both lists (Tables 1 and 2) of the most psychologically salient folk taxa in the two languages. The two languages do not share a large number of taxa or species though clearly some terms, even for nondomesticated trees (cf. Balée and  Moore 1991) are cognate (see Table 5). Some of these shared taxa are definitely large trees, such as tajy.

 

Table 5. Folk Taxa in Common (similar terms, similar referents) from Appendixes 1 and 2, of the Ka'apor and Mbya33 with plausible Proto-Tupí-Guaraní reconstructions

Ka'apor          Mbya               *Proto-Tupí-Guaraní                       Referents
                                               (plausible reconstructions)

aju’y                aju'y                           *aju'yß                      Lauraceae spp.
ama’y              amba’y                        *ama'yß                    Ka'apor, Cecropia spp.;                                                                                         Mbya, C. pachystachya
apo’y               guapo’y                       *guapo'yß                 Ka'apor, Clusia sp.                                                                                         Coussapoa sp, Ficus sp.;
                                                                                        Mbya,  Ficus citrifolla
ju’y                  ju’y                            *ju?yß                       spiny palms
pakuri’y*         pakuri                         *pakuri'yß                  Ka'apor, Platonia insignis                                                                                        (Clusiaceae);
                                                                                       Mbya, Rheedia brasiliensis34                                                                                        (Clusiaceae)
tajy                tajy                              *tajy                        Tabebuia spp.
pinuwa’y         pindo                           *pinu'yß                   Ka'apor, Oenocarpus                                                                                        distichus (Arecaceae);                                                                     Mbya, Arecastrum romanzzofianum                                                                                        (Arecaceae)
yrary               ygary                         *ygary                       Cedrela fissilis
jenipa’y           ñandyta                      *ñanipa'yß                 Genipa ameriana
para’y             parapara’y                  *para'yß                     Jacaranda spp.
yŋa                inga                            *yŋa                          Ka'apor, Inga spp.; Mbya,                                                                                        Inga uruguensis

kurumi'y          yvyra kurundi’y          *kurumi'yß                  Trema micrantha

 

As for the Ka’apor top ten, from Table 1, tajy and tajypo are Tabebuia spp., a genus with showy flowers (they are called 'big bang flowerers' for their habit of flowering at once in majestic beauty in the forest—Gentry 1993, 268). As we saw with the Mbya and Ka'apor, these are showy enough to be used as a calendar species; they also have tall, large crowns (Gentry 1992, 199). A tajy is no. 19 on the Mbya list (Appendix 2). The second folk taxon, parawa’y is the most common taxon in the forest. The most common scientific species in that taxon, Eschweilera coriacea, is a canopy tree "to 37 m tall" (Mori and  Prance 1990, 205), which is significantly tall. Number 4 in psychological salience is Manilkara huberi, called yrykywa'y, and it is nothing less than a 'massive tree' (Pennington 1990, 80). Tareka’y (Bagassa guianensis), no. 5 in psychological salience on Table 1, is an enormous tree of the high forest reaching 45 m in height (Berg 2001, 69). The several Hymenaea spp. denoted by 7 and 9 are also large, especially no. 7, which is Hymenaea courbaril var. courbaril (jetai?y), which is 'a large tree to 40 m tall in forests . . .' (Lee and  Langenheim 1975, 81).

 

In terms of the Mbya, ygary  (Cedrela fissilis) no. 5 on Table 2, which is the sacred tropical cedar tree that harbors the morning mist believed to be where the origins of life are found, has among its field characters height ranges of 30 m to 40 m (Pennington 1981, 366).  The number 1 tree on Table 2, Yvyra pytã (Peltophorum dubium), at 20-35 m in height (Torres et al 1989), is a tall tree that is known for its yellow flowers. In the Mbya agricultural calendar, its flowering indicates the beginning of ára yma, one of the three seasons in which they divide the year, and this corresponds to the end of the austral summer. At the flowering of yvyra pytã, the Mbya do their final planting of seeds before winter.


The second most psychologically salient tree by Smith's s on Table 2, yvyra pere (Apuleia leiocarpa), is also an enormous tree, at 20-45 m in height (Killeen et al.1993, 398; Torres et al. 1989, 92); although it is a different subspecies, in Balée (1994, 279), Apuleia leiocarpa ssp. molaris is referred to as a 'large tree of the old fallow' in the eastern Amazonian habitat of the Ka'apor.  The third psychologically most salient tree on the Mbya list from Table 2, kurupa'y (Anadenanthera colubrina) is from 18 to 30 m in height. Guavira (Campomanesia xanthocarpa) is the fourth tree in Table 2, and is only of medium height at 10-20 m; it is widespread in the area (Landrum 1986, 35). Its fruit is important in the well studied Mbya myth of the twins, a myth also present in almost all Guarani groups. The fruit was created to trick multiple evil spirits who had devoured the mother of the twins Kuaray (Sun) and Jachy (Moon), with the objective of taking them to a watercourse where they were to be drowned and from which a pregnant female escaped who would then turn into a jaguar.


The most important trees in a psychological sense (again using Smith's s as a proxy for what is psychologically important or salient) tend to be tall, big, and hard. What the Mbya and Ka’apor data suggest, therefore, is that the philosophical concept of 'trees are big' actually has cognitive and statistical support in two non-Western languages of Neotropical South America. What trees are least psychologically salient? These include folk specific names contained already in generics (which is an instance of the question of redundancy, inherent in the method), such as Ka'apor tajytawa (no. 245 in Appendix 1, meaning 'yellow tajy'), a kind of tajy (no. 1, Tabebuia spp.)  and Mbya amba'y guachu (no. 102 in Appendix 2, meaning 'large amba'y'), a kind of amba'y (no. 75, Cecropia pacystachya). Also included are plants that are of dubious status as 'trees,' and this would be clear no doubt were one to carry out triads and consensus analysis, such as warumã (no. 289 in Appendix 1), which an earlier sample of Ka'apor informants had classified as an herb (Balée 1994, 348), referencing the genus Ischnosiphon, which is used in making many basketry items, including the tipiti (manioc press) and sieve and Mbya guembe (Philodendron sp.), which is no. 134 in Appendix 2, used for sundry cordage purposes in Mbya technology as well as in Mbya ritual (its fruits represent human masculinity). It incidentally has no lignaceous properties or uses. These are not  hard or large specimens of plants. The last 'tree' on the Mbya Appendix 2 list is a tiny treelet, Trema micrantha, yvyra kurundi'y ('wood-abcess'), which has a cognate in the Ka'apor language, in terms of similarity of sound and referent, far down that list at no. 140 on Appendix 1, kurumi'y (literally, "the boys' tree"). Other folk taxa of low salience include introduced species. All of these are domesticates. They include mostly species from the Ka'apor list of Appendix 1: 'mango' mang'y  (Mangifera indica) [no. 168], 'lime' irimã'y (Citrus aurantiifolia) [no. 270] 'orange' (Citrus sinensis) [no. 276], and 'gallego lime' Citrus medica-acida [no. 281]. The only traditional domesticate, Theobroma cacao, is at no. 280. Otherwise, traditional domesticates are excluded from the list of trees, which is in keeping with the concept that traditional domesticates do not constitute natural life forms (Balée 1989, 1994, 179-81). Mbya respondents did not even include a culturally most important tree, ka'a, on the list of trees once in the freelisting exercise, namely, South American holly or yerba mate (Ilex paraguariensis),from which an important stimulant is made. Arguably this is because it is a traditional domesticate of the region (e.g., Eibl et al. 2000), even though feral populations of it exist. On the other hand, the introduced paraíso (Melia azedarach), an ornamental also economically important in Misiones (Eibl et al. 2000), made its way onto the list, but at a very low rank, at no. 103, perhaps precisely because it is not a traditional nondomesticate.

 

There are many aspects of treeness to the Mbya and Ka’apor, including their material uses in subsistence and culture, aesthetic value, antecedence as human ancestors, spiritual condition as beings with souls, or receptacles of the origins of life and humankind. One definitional aspect of tree in both Mbya and Ka’apor cases seems primary, however, and it likely occurred before these other criteria. That is the combined attribute of bigness and lignaceousness or woodiness. As such, physicality, or primitiveness in Friedrich’s terms, would seem to be indeed a universal attribute and a good starting point of the condition of treeness, and this is not just inferable by language comparison or philosophical deduction alone, but is evident also from the very nature of the referents and their relative dominance in the landscape. If Aristotle’s definition (1998) of natural things in terms of substance as essence is provisionally correct, we can argue that the domain of Mbya and Ka’apor folk subconsciousness is actually as Western in philosophical outlook as anything civilization has ever devised, though their own conscious mythology concerning the origins of fauna, flora, and humanity are decidedly nonwestern.

 

Acknowledgements


We would like to acknowledge the Tulane University Stone Center for Latin American Studies, and the Tulane University Research Enhancement Fund for support of research in 2007-08. Also we thank Irma Stella Insaurralde, Curator of the Herbario Universidad Nacional de Misiones, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Químicas y Naturales for determinations of several specimens of trees reported in Table 2. Finally, we are grateful to Rudy Sayas and Eliseo Sosa for various kinds of field assistance in the Mbya research and to Valdemar Ka'apor for logistical and other support in the Ka'apor research.

 

Notes

 

1“Les espèces botaniques, même ainsi définies au travers d’une langue éteinte et supposée neutre, restent le produit d’une réflexion classificatoire issu du cerveau humain . . .”
2“La comparaison synchronique entre des langues ou encore la comparaison diachronique
entre des états d’une langue, mettent en jeu des échelles de temps et des échelles d’espace. Tandis que les premières permettent d’appréhender les survivances d’activités antérieures, les rémanences d’un état social aboli, les secondes rendent compte des effets de contact, du voisinage ou au contraire de l’éloignement des groupes humains.”
3Wood/tree polysemy is extremely common in the world’s languages (Brown 1984: 60; Witkowski et al. 1981). Brown (1984: 61) suggests that the term for ‘wood’ preceded that of tree, ontologically. The idea is that society had uses for wood before it reached a scale of sophistication where it might require terms for life-form categories like ‘trees.’
4Carlos Fausto (2007) has recently voiced skepticism over the longstanding scholarly emphasis on the originality of Mbya religion, including its separateness from whites and Christianity, and including its notion of what is sanctified and what is not. For the present analysis, what is important
is the present, or synchronic Mbya belief in the existence of trees in the Selva Paranaense as genuine beings with souls, and their corollary belief that some of these trees are harbingers of the original morning mist, the sacred substance where life itself and all that is known in the world began, whether that complex of belief is syncretic and post-conquest history or not. In the same way, what is important to the present analysis is that the life form term yvyra refers to trees themselves first to the extent that the Mbya classify these first as organisms in nature so to speak, rather than as utilitarian objects (sticks, poles, and so on—see note i).
5The procedures described herewith were approved by the Tulane Office of Human Research Protection as IRB Study no. 08-00052U, Tulane Internal no. 14913. The Ministerio de Ecología y Recursos Naturales Renovables of Misiones Province, Argentina approved collections of voucher
specimens used in this study (reported in Table 2), all of which were deposited at the Herbario of the Universidad Nacional de Misiones, Argentina, at Posadas, Argentina. Collections of voucher specimens and conduct of ethnobotanical and related research in the Ka’apor habitat reported in this article were approved by CNPq and FUNAI under a series of research authorizations granted to Balée in the 1980s and 1990s. Freelisting interviews conducted with Ka’apor informants in the summer 2008 were approved by Valdemar Ka’apor (President of the Associação Ka’apor do Rio Gurupi) and the regional office of FUNAI, Belém, Pará, Brazil. No biological collections of any kind were made in Brazil in summer 2008.
6Because the only operative numbers for the purpose of comparison between the two languages were the results of the calculations that gave the Smith’s s values from computation in ANTHROPAC, we did not think it necessary to include frequency and average rank data per species per language in Tables 1-4 and in Appendixes 1 and 2. These data can be made available, however, upon request to the corresponding author.

 

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Appendix 1

Ka'apor Tree Names by Freelisting, sorted by Smith's s

 

 

Folk Taxon

Scientific Taxon

Smith's s

1

tajy

Tabebuia spp

0.775

2

parawa'y

Eschweilera spp.

0.718

3

tajypo

Tabebuia spp.

0.635

4

yrykywa'y

Manilkara huberi

 0.474

5

tareka'y

 Bagassa guianensis  

0.467

6

akaju'y

Anacardium spp.

 0.437

7

jetai'y

Hymenaea parvifolia

0.408

8

jaxiamyr          

Lecythis idatimon

0.398

9

tarapai'y

Hymenaea spp.

0.389

10

yrapitang

Brosimum rubescens 

 0.356

11

pyky'a'y

Caryocar villosum

0.302

12

janiro'y

Carapa guianensis

0.274

13

kumaru'y

Dipteryx odorata

0.261

14

irayrupe'y

?

0.259

15

pinuway'y

Oenocarpus distichus

0.249

16

pakuri'y          

Platonia insignis

0.246

17

akuxityrywa'y

Pouteria macrophylla

0.243

18

ywyry'y

Lecythis chartacea

0.237

19

paraku'y

Chimarrhis turbinate
Aspidosperma cylindrocarpon

 0.237

20

pytyminem'y

Couratari oblongifolia

0.235

21

jeju'y

Andira sp. 1
Astronium lecointei

 

0.225

22

paju'ã'y

Couepia guianensis
ssp. guianensis

0.225

23

makuku'y

Licania spp.; Ouratea spp.
Hirtella racemosa var. racemosa

 

0.213

24

kupa'y

Copaifera spp.           

0.211

25

akaú'y

Helicostylis tomentosa
Pouteria bilocularis

0.210

26

japukwai'y

Lecythis pisonis

0.203

27

pytymy'y

Couratari guianensis

0.199

28

kyky'y

Newtonia spp.,
Pithecellobium comunis  

 

0.197

29

wasai'y

Euterpe oleracea

 0.197

 

 

30

para'y

Jacaranda spp.

0.186

 

31

wa'i'y

Pouteria reticulata ssp. reticulata

0.173

 

32

karã'tu'ã'y      

?'

0.170

 

33

pyky'aran'y

Caryocar glabrum

0.169

 

34

ajã'kywa'y      

Apeiba spp.

0.165

 

35

kupapa'y

Pouteria spp. 

0.165

 

36

mamawiran'y

Jacaratia spinosa

0.158

 

37

jywojy

Minquartia guianensis

0.156

 

38

tajyran

Eugenia sp., Rauvolfia sp.

0.148

 

39

tamaran'y

Zollernia paraensis    

0.148

 

40

ywatuju'y 

?

0.147

 

41

ararakã'y       

Aspidosperma spp.    

0.143

 

42

waxyngy

Ceiba pentandra

0.135

 

43

ywyse'y

Simaruba amara

0.133

 

44

yraty'y

Symphonia globulifera

0.132

 

45

yrary

Cedrela fissilis

0.131

 

46

tukwãmi'u'y

Virola spp.     

0.129

 

47

waruwa'y

Tetragastris spp.

0.127

 

48

kumaru'yxĩ

Apuleia leiocarpa var. molaris

0.125

 

49

sekãtã'y

Protium trifoliolatum 

0.124

 

50

taxi'y

Tachigali spp.

0.123

 

51

paru'y

 

0.122

 

52

tapi'ipamyr'y

Sterculia pruriens

0.122

 

53

xixirupe'y

Inga alba, I. brevialata

0.120

 

54

yŋahu'y

Inga capitata, I. cinammomea

0.118

 

55

yrapitã'ran     

Brosimum paclesum, Maquira guianensis

0.117

 

56

apa'y

Parahancornia spp.

0.117

 

57

mani'iran'y     

Stryphnodendron polystachyum

0.116

 

58

yrykywaju'y

Manilkara bidentata ssp. surinamensi

0.115

 

59

wapini'y

Licania canescens, L. kunthiana

0.113

 

60

ynga'y

Inga spp.

0.113

 

61

pina'y

Duguetia spp.

0.112

 

62

kanei'y

Protium spp.  

0.111

 

63

kupi'i'y

Goupia glabra           

0.110

 

64

kypyhu'y         

Theobroma grandiflorum      

0.108

 

65

pakurisõsõ'y

Rheedia spp.

0.107

 

66

parawa'ywi

Eschweilera amazonica, E. micrantha

0.104

 

67

irayrupe'atu'y 

Stryphnodendron guianensis    

0.101

 

68

merahyhu'y 

Byrsonima sp.

0.101

 

69

kakwiwran'y

Theobroma speciosum

0.100

70

jupu'y

Parkia pendula

0.100

71

meraypirã'y

Byrsonima laevigata  

0.099

72

ywahu'y

Micropholis melinoniana

0.099

73

kuyer'y   

Lacemella aculeata, Ambelania acida

0.098

74

kyryhu'y

Trattinickia spp.

0.094

75

kururu'y

Taralea oppositifolia 

0.092

76

ama'y 

Cecropia spp.

0.091

77

pywa'y

Rinorea pubiflora

0.089

78

aju'y

Lauraceae spp.           

0.088

79

mytũpusu'y

Gustavia augusta

0.086

80

meraytawa'y

Byrsonima sp.

0.084

81

yŋaperẽ'y       

Inga auristellae, I. heterophylla,
I. marginata, I. miriantha

 

0.083

82

ximo'y

Enterolobium sp. nov., Parkia paraensis

0.082

83

wariwa'y        

?

0.082

84

panari'y        

?

0.081

85

putuny

?

0.079

86

jawi'y

Xylopia nitida

0.077

87

yuwitã'y

?

0.077  

88

inaja'y

Attalea maripa

0.077

89

ximoran'y       

Senna sylvestris

0.075

90

kanaú'y

Himatanthus sucuuba

0.072

91

pani'y

Hymenolobium excelsum

0.072

92

panu'y

?

0.066

93

kyphyran'y     

Pachira aquatica

0.066  

94

ama'yrary      

Pourouma mollis ssp. mollis 

0.066  

95

kuma'y

?

0.065

96

yratawa'y

Pouteria spp.

0.063

97

myratã

Erythroxylum citrifolium

0.062

98

jakuxiri'y

Guarea spp. Trichilia spp.

0.062

99

akajumena'y

Anacardium parvifolium

0.061

100

taperiwa'y

Spondias mombim

0.061

101

ka'ameri'y

Sclerolobium guianense, S. paraense           

0.060

102

ape'y

Cordia spp.          

0.060

103

aju'ywãtã'y

Ocotea rubra 

0.060

104

jurupepe'y      

Dialium guianense    

0.057

105

wamangaputyry         

Senna sp.

0.057

106

u'ytyma'y        

aff. Myrcia sp.           

0.056

107

tapixa'y          

Erythroxylum cf. leptronerum                   

     0.054

108

kurupixi'y       

Croton matourensis

     0.052

109

ma'ewapitaŋ

Eugenia patrissi

     0.052

110

tekwerypihun'y

?

0.050

111

marari'y

Syagrus inajai                                          

0.050

112

kuyeri'ypuku'y

Ambelania acida

 0.049

113

jenipa'y

Genipa americana

 0.049

114

tajyte

Tabebuia impetiginosa

0.048

115

yratyatã'y       

Symphonia globulifera

0.047

116

api'a'y

Guazuma ulmifolia

0.047

117

ama'yãtã        

Cecropia sp.  

0.047

118

tarara'y          

Cupania scrobiculata

0.046

119

kurupusan'y

Simaba aff. cavalcantei

0.046

120

kuyer'y'axĩ

?

0.045

121

waripy'a'y

?

0.045

122

pinahu'y         

Unonopsis rufescens  
Duguetia surinamensis

0.044

123

arapuhatymakangwer'y

Calptranthes or Marlierea sp
Eugenia sp.
Myrcia sp.

0.042

 

 

124

taraku'ã'y

Fusaea longfolia                               

0.042  

125

murure'y        

Brosimum acutifolium spp
interjectum

0.042

126

tapi'irynga'y

Inga rubignosa

0.041

127

paruru'y         

Sacoglottis spp.

0.041

128

karaipe'y        

Licania apetala, L. membranacea,
L. octandra   

 

0.040

129

apari'y

?

0.039

130

uruku'y

Bixa arborea

0.039

131

tangwa'y

Margaritaria nobilis  

0.038

132

merayrupe'y

?

0.038

133

u'ytymapiriri'y

Eugenia sp.

0.038

134

jaxipyta'y        

Talisia spp.

0.038

135

merayte

Byrsonima sp.

0.038

136

marato'y         

Schefflera morototoni

0.037

137

merayran       

?

0.037

138

paraku'ypihun

?

0.037

139

mu'y

Bellucia grossularioides

0.037

140

kurumi'y

Trema micrantha

0.037

141

parara'y

?

0.037

142

kuyer'ypu'a

Lacmellea aculeata

0.036

143

araxiku

Annona paludosa, A. sericea,
Duguetia marcgraviana

0.036

144

panari'ahu'y

?

0.034

145

meri'y

?

0.034

146

parawa'yhu

?

0.034

147

parani'y

Laetia procera

0.034

148

xiringi'y          

Hevea guianensis

0.034

149

wa'iran'y        

Pouteria penicillata   
Duroia sp.

0.033

150

myraran

?

0.033

151

myrawewi'atu'y

Pithecellobium jupumba

0.032

152

ko'y

Cocos nucifera

0.032

153

tareka'ypihun

?

0.031

154

yrykywaran'y

?

0.031

155

ajuran'y

Licaria debilis, Ocotea canaliculata,
Ocotea sp.

0.031

156

arakanei'y 

Protium altsoni, P. heptaphyllum spp
heptaphyllum

0.031

157

ka'ame'y         

Pourouma guianensis ssp
guianensis 

0.031

158

kupa'ypitã

Copaifera sp.

0.030

159

tukury

Guettarda divaricata 

0.030

 

160

tajahumyra

Tapirira pekoltiana    

0.030

161

kupa'ytuwyr

Copaifera sp.

0.030

162

putunyhowy

?

0.030

163

jetahu'y          

Attalea speciosa

0.029

164

paxi'y

Socratea exorrhiza

0.029

165

kupa'ypihun

Copaifera sp. 

0.029

166

apini'i'y

?

0.029

167

tarekaran'y

?

0.029

168

yrakĩ'ĩ'y

Aparisthmium cordatum

0.029

169

ja'irany                      

?

0.028

170

pakosarara

Phenakospermum guianense

0.028

171

janiro'yhu       

?

0.028

172

jawi'ypihun

prob. Xylopia nitida

0.027

173

wariãkã'y

?

0.027

174

ywame'y

?

0.026

175

myrasawa'e

?

0.026

176

kywahu'y   

?

 0.025

177

kykany

?

0.025

178

kamoro'i'y

?

0.025

179

aju'iwate

Lauraceae sp.

0.025

180

tata'y

Guatteria scandens

0.025

181

mykupi'a'y

Iryanthera juruensis

0.025

182

kaxima'y

Mabea spp.

0.024

183

yŋate

Inga sp.

0.024

184

sypotawa   

?

0.024

185

ka'uwapusan'y

Siparuna amazonica

0.024

186

teremumyra

Anaxagorea dolichocarpa

0.023

187

aju'iwapu'a

Lauraceae spp.   

0.023

188

pajangi'y  

?

0.023

189

ajuwapihun'y

Ocotea amazonica, O. caudata

0.023

190

yŋapihun

Inga sp.

0.023

191

aju'iwahu'y

Licaria brasiliensis

0.023

192

yrahu'y

?

0.023

193

myra'i'a

?

0.023

194

mirixi'y

Mauritia flexuosa

0.023

195

yŋahowy

Inga nobilis

0.023

196

pariwa'y

?

0.023

197

jakuxiri'ypirã

Guarea guidonia

0.022

198

akwãwyrã'y

?

0.022

199

mikumyra

?

0.022

200

jakuxiri'ytuwyr

Trichilia micrantha

0.022

201

jawamyrahy

Protium aracouchini

0.021

202

paxi'i'y

?

0.021

203

myrapu'am

?

0.021

204

waya'y

Psidium guajava

0.021

205

janaimyra

Dendrobangia boliviana

0.020

 

206

xamato'y   

?

0.020

207

ju'iwaran'y

?

0.020

208

majahuwa'y

?

0.020

209

merayãtãhu

Byrsonima sp.

 0.019

210

waruwaiwa'y

?

0.019

211

tupijamyra'y

?

0.019

212

merayhowy

Byrsonima sp.    

0.019

213

myrwawak

Sagotia racemosa

0.018

214

araruwai'iran'y

?

0.018

215

yrakiãtã'y 

?

0.018

216

ama'yte

Cecropia sp.     

0.018

217

para'i'y

?

0.018

218

myraputyry

?

 0.017

219

ararahukatãi'y

Eschweilera obversa

0.017

220

ka'aperan'y

?

0.017

221

awai'i'y

Canna indica

0.016

222

ju'y

Astrocaryum gyncanthum

 0.016

223

janumyra       

Eugenia omissa, Myrciaria pyrifolia 

0.016

224

kururuju'y      

?

0.015

225

tukumã'y        

Astrocaryum vulgare 

0.015

226

wayaran'y      

?

0.015

227

akajupina'y  

Anacardium giganteum

0.014

228

taxi'ypihun

Tachigali sp.

0.014

229

sawajamyra

Capparis sola
Paypayrola grandiflora

0.014

230

taxi'ytuwyr

Tachigali sp.

0.014

231

sapukaisaime'y

?

0.014

232

ŋgatãhu'y

Inga sp.

0.013

233

ju'ika'a

Aciotis purpurescens,
Miconia ceramicarpa

 

0.013

234

jangwateka'a

Selaginella sp.

0.013

235

ama'ytuwyr

Cecropia concolor, C. obtusa           

0.013

236

wa'y    

Pouteria reticulata spp. reticulata

0.012

237

jamyr  

Piper spp.

0.012

238

owy   

Geonoma baculifera  

0.012

239

ywaju'y           

?

0.012

240

maraja'y

Bactris maraja

0.012

241

eyri'y

?

0.012

242

kerejuru'y

?

0.011

243

karaijuru'y

?

0.011

244

myrawapihun'y          

?

0.011

245

tajytawa

Tabebuia sp.  

0.011

246

tayrŋa'y        

Inga sp.

0.011

247

eyrihu'y          

?         

0.011

248

myrawatuwyr'y

Rauia resinosa

0.011

249

myrahowy'y

Sapotaceae sp.           

0.010

250

pywahu'y

Rinorea flavescens     

0.010

251

tajypihun

Tabebuia sp.  

0.010

252

inamumyra

Excellodendron barbatum

0.010

253

pywate'y         

Rinorea sp.    

0.010

254

yraputyr         

?

0.010

255

waxĩxĩ'y

Zanthoxylum rhoifolium

0.009

256

kanei'yte

Protium sp.

0.009

257

ywãtã'y          

?

0.009

258

kanei'ytuwyr

Protium giganteum var. giganteum, P. palldium,
P. spruceanum          

 

   0.008

259

myraky

Myrciaria tenella

0.008

260

amaruiwy

?

0.008

261

apo'i'y

Clusiaceae      

0.007

262

tajyporan

?

0.007

263

wajangi'y

Vismia guianensis

0.007

264

paniran'y

?

0.007

265

myrawawaktuwyr

?

 0.006

266

katuwa           

?

 0.006

267

tekwerituwyr'y

Cordia sp.

 0.006

268

mang'y

Mangifera indica       

0.005

269

tapirwariwa'y

?

0.005

270

irimã'y

Citrius aurantiifolia   

0.004

271

pyky'apihun'y

?

0.004

272

asiwa'y           

?

0.004

273

pa'imyra         

Dodecastigma integrifolium  

0.004

274

yrakãxĩ'y

?

 0.003

275

yrawewei'iwatuk

?

 0.003

276

narãi'y

Citrus sinensis

 0.003

277

karaiperan'y

?

 0.003

278

yŋapuku'y

Inga sp.

 0.003

279

piri'a'y

Bactris setosa 

 0.003

280

kaka'y

Theobroma cacao

 0.003

281

irimahu'y        

Citrus medica-acida  

0.002

282

ywapihun

?

0.002

283

apo'y

Clusia sp., Ficus sp.

0.002

284

tiwiwaran'y

?

0.002

285

jaxipyryta'y

?

0.002

286

aniranmixi'y

?

0.002

287

ywyrypihun'y

Lecythis sp.    

0.002

288

mukaja'y        

Acrocomia aculeata

 0.001

289

warumã         

Ischnosiphon sp.

0.001

290

kwere'ĩ

Bactris humilis

0.001

 

Total/Average:      1031    42.958