The Social Life of Trees

Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism

Laura Rival, Laura Rival

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000324181
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Biological Sciences
• Thema: Botany

The passionate response of the British public to the Newbury Bypass is a revealing measure of how strongly people feel about trees and the environment. Similarly, in the United States, the giant sequoia of California is an enduring national symbol that inspires intense feelings. As rainforests are sacrificed to the interests of multi-national corporations and traditional ways of life disappear, the status of forests, the cultural significance of trees, and the impact of conservation policies are subjects that have inspired intense engagement. Why do people feel so strongly about trees? With this explosion of interest in environmental issues, a serious study of what trees mean to people has long been overdue. This interdisciplinary book responds to this need by providing the first cross-cultural analysis of tree symbolism. Drawing on rich case studies, contributors explore the processes through which trees are used as metaphors of identity and continuity. Political struggles over forest resources feature prominently, and the perceptions of trees in various cultures provide telling insights into the ways in which human societies conceptualize nature.As well as being a major contribution to the field of symbolic anthropology, this comprehensive study will be essential reading for students in a wide range of courses and for anyone with a keen interest in the politics of ecology, the occult and neo-paganism, and the history and sociology of environmentalism in its widest sense.

Trees, from Symbols of Life and Regeneration to Political Artefacts

Laura Rival

This book explores the symbolic significance of trees in a number of contemporary cultures. From its beginnings, anthropology has concerned itself as much with the ways in which natural processes are conceptualised and the natural world classified, as with the ways in which human societies interact with their natural environments and use natural resources. Anthropologists have long debated the fact that cultures as symbolic systems derive meanings largely from natural elements. Ever since the seminal essay De Quelques Formes Primitives de Classification by Durkheim and Mauss (1963 [1903]), they have pondered on the social origin of human representations of natural categories, as well as on the emergence of objective natural history. The present book is part of this continuous effort to theorise interactions between human societies and their natural environments. While much anthropological writing deals with animals, landscapes and domesticated crops, very little concerns trees perse.¹ However, trees provide some of the most visible and potent symbols of social process and collective identity.

Tree symbolism, it might be argued, reflects the human urge to express ideas through external and material signs, no matter what these signs might be (Durkheim 1976 [1915]: 127). Anticipating some of the recent theories developed within material culture studies, Emile Durkheim remarks that Australian Aborigines carve, tattoo or paint their totems out of the need to represent the idea they form of their totems. This desire ‘to translate thought into matter’ leads him to reflect on the relevance of externalisation, materialisation and physicality for social theory, and to conclude that ‘a collective sentiment can become conscious of itself only by being fixed upon some material object’ (Durkheim 1976 [1915]: 236). The paradigmatic focus on the material constitution of society and the examination of material forms in terms of the social effects of their physical manifestation have proved very productive. We have now achieved a greater understanding of the dialectical relationship between, for instance, subject and object (Miller 1987), or the functional and the meaningful (Gell 1996). We are also in a better position to analyse modern social processes without resorting to either ‘orientalism’ or ‘occidentalism’ (Carrier 1995). However, the paradigm has its shortcomings. In material culture studies, anything material is treated as if it were object-like. But, as this collection amply illustrates, the physical presence of a tree is not that of an artefact; a tree is a living organism.

It could be argued, then, that trees are natural symbols. As defined by Mary Douglas (1970), for whom they are primarily derived from human physiology and bodily substances, natural symbols reflect the dual nature of humankind as both animal-like (the body) and god-like (the mind). This characterisation of natural symbols, not unlike numerous pre-Lévi-Straussian theories of totemism stressing the connection between totems and animal species, emphasises the polarity between residual, biological animality and developing humanity. Cast in this mould, animal symbolism is everywhere seen as an expression of the irreconcilability between, on the one hand, the organic body and its threatening bestiality, and, on the other, the mind, locus of morality and spirituality. With such a dualistic frame, the symbolic contribution of other life forms, particularly plants, whose social and metaphysical significance does not seem to lie in drawing an absolute distinction between nature and culture, but, on the contrary, in reaffirming the continuity of biological species within the living world, can only be devalued.

Some would argue that there is no need to study the symbolisation of trees, for trees represent little more than a background to activities. Places, rather than plants, have symbolic value; so trees would be better studied as part of a landscape. Of course, trees grow and change, but so do all elements in a landscape, be they natural or built. At once composite and historical, landscapes are permanently under construction (Ingold 1993), as well as open to reinterpretation (Bender 1993). The problem with the landscape approach, as William Cronon (1995: 20) so rightly puts it, is that ‘nature’ may to a large extent be a human idea, but, before all, it is a non-human thing. Cognitive anthropologists such as Pascal Boyer or Scott Atran would add that even if they have been endowed with cultural, historically changing meanings, natural kinds in the landscape, such as animal and plant species, are mentally apprehended through innate conceptual mechanisms quite unlike those triggered by landscapes, buildings, or any other human artefact.

If landscapes are essentially cultural and historical, the same could be said of the category ‘tree’, for a tree is not a biological species existing in the world previous to a work of recognition and classification. Atran (1990:35), however, makes the convincing case that trees form a natural category, a life-form: ‘The natural discontinuities apparent in the conception of tree pertain to processes of evolutionary convergence bound to ecological considerations in the competition for sunlight. People naturally tend to find trees phenomenally compelling because of their evident ecological role in determining local distributions of flora and fauna.’ If the life-form ‘tree’ is an ontological category as defined by Boyer (1994), then it corresponds to elementary assumptions - and inferences that can be made - about what sort of thing a tree is, as well as to domain-specific principles that structure intuitive expectations concerning trees.

Although the authors of the contributions collected here have approached tree symbolism from very different perspectives, what comes out of the ethnographies is that trees are used symbolically to make concrete and material the abstract notion of life, and that trees are ideal supports for such symbolic purpose precisely because their status as living organisms is ambiguous. The rest of the chapter is devoted to developing and supporting this thesis. After a section on the necessity and danger of cross-cultural comparison, I discuss the role of tree symbolism in life cycle rituals and community politics. I then show that tree symbols revolve around two essential qualities, vitality and self-regenerative power, and conclude on the biological particularities which make trees so amenable to life-reaffirming and death-denying cultural representations.

The Comparability of Beliefs and Symbols

This collection belongs to the growing body of work showing dissatisfaction with the notion of ‘culture’, and with holistic analyses of cultural knowledge. The long tradition of interpretation of natural symbols as internal representations of external reality has come to a close. Mary Douglas (1996: Ch. 6) herself has somewhat disowned her classic analysis of Lele animal symbolism, on the ground that the identification between animal kingdom and social life works both ways. Natural symbols are not just projections or metaphors of social life. So, rather than looking for the correspondence of a particular social structure and a unique way of dividing up the continuous and undifferentiated biological world, she now suggests that we identify the theories that sustain the classification of animals and humans, and give meaning to the metaphors, for ‘there is a more fundamental, non-metaphorical kind of connection between the way humans think of themselves and how they think of animals’ (Douglas 1996: 138). Symbolic similarities, she continues, result from local theories about life and death, as well as from the practical and utilitarian knowledge of animals constituted in everyday interactions. By emphasising that theories must be seen as local and that meanings should be established with reference to use, Douglas (1996: 128) of course maintains that similarity is relative, variable and culture-dependent. But her - still functionalist - approach to similarity brings her, almost ironically, somewhat close to Frazer’s law of similarity and principle that ‘when customs are similar in different societies, we may then infer that the motives of the people performing them are also similar’ (Ackerman 1987: 82).

Frazer, like other nineteenth-century scholars interested in comparative religion, was intrigued by the symbolic significance of trees in classical mythology, the religions of ancient civilisations, and many ‘primitive’ religious beliefs and rituals. To Frazer, primitive religions, whether animistic or totemistic, were first of all an attempt to make sense of, and control, the cycles of vegetational death and rebirth. He saw in tree worship the evidence that all religions had originated in the personification of nature. Early men worshipped trees and other life powers because ‘everything was to them at once material and spiritual, the animate and inanimate being almost undistinguished’ (MacLennan 1869: 414). Frazer spent his life compiling sources and accumulating facts on offerings to trees, propriation ceremonies preceding tree felling, ritual weddings between humans and trees, or beliefs in the mutual fertilising influences of human sexual intercourse and vegetational growth. Although clearly decontextualised and without much comparative force, his exhaustive collection of customs relating to trees should not be simply dismissed as speculative, arbitrary or overdetermined by Greek mythology. In the 1955 supplement to The Golden Bough, for example, a whole chapter is dedicated to the worship of trees and sacred groves. One hundred-and-fourteen beliefs and ritual practices from thirty-eight non-Western cultures are cited.² Such recurrences must be accounted for if we are to reassess the social determination of myths and symbols, and the comparability of beliefs (Strathern 1990).

Cross-cultural comparison remains the main task of anthropology, but to understand cultural specificity, that is, the ways in which historical and ecological processes have influenced the emergence and development of particular cultural forms, we need to have a clearer idea of the character of cultural regularities. We need to identify what human cultures share in common, what remains untouched by history, and why. Today’s renewed interest in the way human thought is embodied (i.e. constrained by, and depending on, the body), as well as the extent to which experience shapes reason, has revived the debate about the generic psychic unity of humankind, particularly in the context of human thinking about the biological world. We clearly need to address the issue of recurrence in a new way, and this is precisely the task that a few cognitive anthropologists have set for themselves.

The commitment to analyse the interplay of universal physiological and psychological factors with specific cultural and historical ones has led Sperber and his followers (most prominently Boyer, Atran and Bloch) to rethink symbolism as a cognitive mechanism with specific functions in the construction of knowledge and the working of memory. Sperber (1996), for whom symbols are metarepresentations of hard-to-process beliefs, does not analyse symbolism as a cultural language, that is, a form of social communication which can be interpreted through exegesis and other semiological approaches. Atran (1990: 250) contends that symbolism, the goal of which ‘is not to extend factual knowledge, resolve natural paradoxes or increasingly restrict the scope of interesting conceptual puzzles’, ‘goes the way of eternal truth, and is sustained in that path by faith in the authority of those charged with the task of continually reinterpreting the truth and fitting it to new circumstances’. He draws a sharp contrast between the ‘ontological categories’ of true, common-sense knowledge about the world, and symbolic representations. In other words, he establishes a radical and qualitative distinction between concepts such as biological species (i.e. living kinds), which are determined by innate cognitive dispositions, spontaneously learnable and highly similar across cultures, and forms of knowledge such as symbols and metaphors, which are only learnt through structured and directed tuition, or in specific social environments or contexts. Building on Sperber and Atran, Boyer (P. Boyer 1993a, b, 1994) offers a new interpretation of religious symbolism. His analysis of religious symbols, like that of Victor Turner (1967), starts by acknowledging their intrinsic disparity. But whereas Turner speaks of ritual symbols as exhibiting a tension between two poles of meaning - one socio-moral, the other sensory - Boyer (P. Boyer 1994: 123–4) identifies two different kinds of knowledge in all religious representations. One consists of common-sense elementary assumptions about the nature of the world, the other of counter-intuitive claims violating such common sense. The content of Boyer’s elementary assumptions about the nature of the world (i.e. ontological categories) is richer than Turner’s sensory perceptions. Innate and domain-specific, ontological categories are neither acquired through teaching, nor abstracted gradually from direct, physical experience in the world. And Boyer’s counter-intuitive claims have no exact match in the socio-moral components of the social order (Turner’s other pole), for Boyer is exclusively interested in t...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Trees, from Symbols of Life and Regeneration to Political Artefacts
• Part I Why Trees Are Good to Think
• Part II Trees, Human Life and the Continuity of Communities
• Part III Woods, Forests and Politics
• Postface
• Notes on Contributors
• Index