Introduction

Despite some determined efforts to eliminate him, must published reports on ethnobiology still list folk categories and classificatory constructs on the basis of the hypothetical omniscient ‘speaker–hearer’. Much the same is true for the ethnographic analysis of any kind of category. This non-existent figure has the distinction of possessing a maximum knowledge of the corpus under examination, the sum total of the knowledges of all persons consulted, without reflecting the practical (and generally partial) knowledge of individuals or indicating the dimensions and degree of variation. Yet if data are assembled using this heuristic device, they will always be in excess of those pragmatic competences common to all individuals. Moreover, they will not reveal unique abilities or those shared by only part of the population. These are matters which may be of considerable sociological significance. So, since there is a large area with an uneven range of abilities, and since no techniques of elicitation are ever completely exhaustive, variation must be expected from any corpus, even if the data provide no means of revealing it.

There are a few early references in the ethnobiological literature to variation between individuals and between groups [Henderson and Harrington, 1914: 8].