ingold 1999 review rival social life of trees-o.pdf

7/30/2019 ingold 1999 review rival social life of trees-o.pdf

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276 Book ReviewsMyers, Jerom e Keeler & Lee L. Bean. 1968. yi? t hough t and speech as do people? OurDecade L ater: AFoUow-Up of Social C lass anthropologist is likely to jump totheand M ental Illness. N ew York: Wiley. conclusion that he or she is dealing with

dDd6.PassmgOn:mSocialOr- ^ instance of metaphor, of a symbolic. N ew York: Prentice-Hall. ,. . 1 1 . u 1construction m which trees have beenselected to 'stand for' persons (presumedhuman) onaccount ofproperties that. The So cial Li fe of make them peculiarly appropriate for

Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree such a role. The task, then, is to elucidateSymbolism. Oxford: Berg, xiv + 315 pp. these properties, and to show how they

are made salient in the social life oftheFrom time to time, anthropology belatedly human community. It goes without saying,'wakes up' to the presence and importance, in this approach, that trees do not have ain the midst ofhuman societies everywhere, social life in the sense that human beingsof categories of beings to which ithad do. To participate in society, the humanpreviously paid only passing attention, person need be a symbol of nothing butThus we'discovered'children, and animals. itself. Humans are literally social, treesNow it is the turn of trees. In each case, only metaphorically so. Yet such adis-the cause oferstwhile neglect lay not tinction seems to fly in the face of whatmerely in acertain empirical blindness, the people are telling us. This is that thebut in prejudices deeply embedded in the tree's presence as a person is not a symbolicframeworks ofreceived theory. Above presence, but a real, experiential one. It isall, we are heirs to a theoretical tradition there, in your environment, as a being tothat - while keen to situate all intention which you relate, and which reciprocallyand action within a context of social rela- relates to you. The social world, in short,tions - insists upon restricting the scope is not bounded by the limits of humanity,of these relations within the bounds of an with an asocial nature beyond; rather itessential humanity. Thus the child, con- embraces relations with, and among, be-ceived as not yetfiillysocialised, was ex- ings of all kinds: human and non-human,eluded from fliU participation, as was the animal and plant.animal - which could participate only by Only now that the theoretical wall thatway of its anthropomorphic treatment as used to divide the 'two worlds' of societyan 'honorary' human. As for trees, the idea and nature is on the brink of collapse, canthat they could really enjoy asocial life we begin to glimpse the possibility of anwould have struck most anthropologists, anthropology that could as readily coun-at least until recently, as absurd. Animals, tenance the dynamics of social life fromsurely, can move about inan evidently the point of view of a non-human animal,intentional manner, and many possess or even a tree, in an environment that in-voices and can see, touch and hear. But eludes humans, as from the point of viewtrees? ofthe human subject in an environment

Starting from this theoretical premise, that includes animals and trees. The mostwhat should an anthropologist do, con- remarkable feature of this book, which isfronted with ethnographic evidence to the outcome of a conference held in 1996the effect that, in a certain society, trees on 'Trees and wood as social symbols', is


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Book Reviews 277to turn. The tension is evident in the con- tion to this volume by a green activist,tradiction between the book's title. The Angie Zelter, actually written from asocial life of trees, and its subtitle, Anthro - prison cell, sticks out like a sore thumb.polog icalperspectives on tree symbolism. For How are we to respond to this unashamedlyto ask the question, originally put to each proselytising piece? Are we to treat Zelterofthe contributors, 'To which symbolic like a captive informant, and analyse herends have trees been used?', is already to writing for its symbolic content? Politic-assume that trees do not themselves have ally, that would be to side with her captors,a social life, but rather play a figurative What does her impassioned plea amountrole in the social life of humans, to com- to, the analyst would coolly remark, butplement their utilitarian role in human just another alternative worldview?ecology as sources of foodstuffs and raw That is all it would be for Bloch, whomaterials. And indeed, those contributors argues that the attribution of person-likewho did address the question in this form qualities to things like trees is a functionhad little or nothing to say about arboreal of theories' that fill the compartments ofsocial life. On the other hand, those (a a universal but modularised human psy-minority) who set out to show how the chology. There is something almost pathe-life histories of human beings and trees tic about Bloch's increasingly desperateare truly intertwined - or how, in Schutz's attempts to shore up the cognitivist para-memorable phrase, they 'grow older to- digm, with its appeal to innate categoricalgether' - did not ask how humans use predispositions, in the face of ever-mount-trees symbolically but how they live with ing absurdities. He insists, for example,them relationally. Here, the social and that all humans are disposed to regard liv-the ecological are one and the same. ing things as somehow special, on account

This book contains some fine examples of their common possession of a core pro-of the kind of symbolic analysis that an- perty. So people in all cultures must havethropologists have always done so well, a concept of life. This is not to say, how-such as in the contributions by Bonne- ever, that they all mean the same by it.mere, Giambelli and Howell. But these For many ofthe peoples whose ideas and'add to the collection', as it were, rather feelings are reported in this book, life isthan breaking any new ground theoretic- not a property of things at all, but a wordally. Moreover they risk repeating the for what is going on in the whole field ofmistakes of an older anthropology ofthe relationships within which entities of vari-body which, as will be recalled, treated ous kinds (including humans and trees)the human body as but a symbolic vehicle come into being, grow and take the formsfor meanings whose source lay in society, they do. Thus life is not in trees; ratherconceived as a disembodied realm of col- trees are in life. What makes a tree alive,lective representations. Likewise an ana- then, is its placement in, openness to, andlysis of tree symbolism leads us away interpenetration with, a world. As Ellenfrom the trees themselves, and back to rightly points out, trees are not separablehuman society, in the search for what from the environment inwhich they existthey stand for. And in converting people's (though he wrongly goes on to suggestdeclarations of genuine feeling for trees, that this is not so for animals),and grief over their destruction, into grist In this volume, no-one brings out bet-


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278 Book Reviewdealing with the relations between for- status: simultaneously somewhat aliveesters and their trees in upland Japan. and somewhat dead, mobile and immo-Trees are raised in an environment of bile, ofthe landscape and on it . Certainly,human nurturance, but once cut, they the existence of trees seems to challengebecome the timbers of houses, constitut- many ofthe categorical boundaries thating an environment of nurturance for hu- have traditionally shaped academic in-mans. In their incorporation into the quiry, and this may partially explain theirhouse, trees have a 'second life', which is relative invisibility, up to now, in anthro-reckoned to be as long as their first life pological literature. But the uncertaintyrooted in the ground. So when trees are may be ours alone. With an alternativecut to build a house, replacements must ontology, where life and death are butbe planted for when the house eventually two sides ofa process of creative renewal,has to be rebuilt. The beauty ofthe account where movement is along paths ofgrowthlies not only in its reversibility (it could rather than the displacement of alreadybe written from the point of view ofa tree completed, self-contained beings, andnurtured in a human environment or vice where the landscape is continually under-versa), but also for the way it brings out going formation, the status of trees ashow the life ofthe tree, which lies in the crystallisations of the life process couldresponsiveness of its substance - wood - scarcely be more certain and less ambig-to the conditions ofthe environment (it uous. And it may be this very certainty'breathes'), is not terminated but merely that makes them so significant. This signi-punctuated by its transformation from a ficance, however, is surely not symbolic,'natural' to an 'artefactual' form. The life Trees stand, they do not stand^r, and ithistory ofwood is not over until it eventu- is in their embodied presence, as it is ex-ally rots in the ground. Likewise, as Mauze perienced by those who live in, on, andreports, the cedar wood artefacts ofthe around them, that their meaning resides.Kwakiutl ofthe American Northwest Coastare said to be alive. Moreover the trans- T im Ingoldformation can work in the opposite direction University of Manchesteras well: thus according to Fairhead andLeach, the villagers of Kissidougou in theRepublic of Guinea say that rings of cot- Vieda Skultans. 1998. The Testimony oton trees are the relics of fencing stakes Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Sovifi-om old garden plots, which have taken Latvia. London: Routledge. xxi + 217 pp.root and regrown. Moreover it is com-mon practice among the villagers to train With the increased attention to the con-trees to take on particular forms. In these struction of memory and the ways incontributions, the idea, trumpeted else- which the rendering ofthe past becomeswhere by Atran, that people everywhere a product of both the present and aspira-make a categorical distinction between tions for the future, Vieda Skultans' bookthe living and the artefactual, is compre- is timely and important. Skultans' workhensively refuted. They do not, and in focuses on post-Soviet Latvia and, in par-manycases it would be virtually impossible ticular, on inhabitants' narratives aboutfor them to do so even if they tried! loss, injustice, deportation, and exile in


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ingold 1999 review rival social life of trees-o.pdf

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