Why are the Many Poor?

Phonem - Euphrates

Another characteristic of Negrito life, a characteristic which strikingly demarcates them from the surrounding Christian lowlanders, is their inexhaustible knowledge of the plant and animal kingdoms. This lore includes not only a specific recognition of a phenomenal number of plants, birds, animals, and insects, but also includes a knowledge of the habits and behaviour of each...

The Negrito is an intrinsic part of his own environment, and what is still more important, continually studies his surroundings. Many times I have seen a Negrito, who, when not being certain of the identification of a particular plant, will taste the fruit, smell the leaves, break and examine the stem, comment upon its habitat, and only after all of this, pronounce whether he did or did not know the plant.

The acute observation of the pygmies and their awareness of the inter-relationships between the plant and animal life... is strikingly pointed out by their discussions of the living habits of bats. The tididin lives on the dry leaves of palms, the dikidik on the underside of the leaves of the wild banana, the litlit in bambo clumps, the kolumboy in holes in trees, the konanaba in dark thickets, and so forth. In this manner, the Pinatubo Negritos can distinguish the habits of more than fifteen species of bats. Of course, the classification of bats, as well as of insects, birds, animals, fish and plants, is determined primarily by their actual physicial differences and/or similarities.

Most Negrito men can with ease enumerate the specific or descriptive names of at least four hundred and fifty plants, seventy-five birds, most of the snakes, fish, insects, and animals, and of even twenty species of ants...* and the botanical knowledge of the mananambal, the 'medicine men and women', who use plants constantly in their practice, is truly astounding.

* Also at least forty-five types of edible ground mushrooms and ear-fungi (1.cc., p.231) and on the technolgical plane, more than fifty types of arrows (id., pp.265-8)

from R.B. Fox, 'The Pinatubo Negritos: their useful plants and material culture', The Phillipine Journal Of Science, vol. 81 (1952), nos.3-4, Manila, 1953.

(posted in memory of Quintus Fabius)