276

Book Reviews

Myers, Jerome Keeler & Lee L. Bean. 1968. yi? thought and speech as do people? Our Decade Later: A FoUow-Up of Social Class anthropologist is likely to jump to the and Mental Illness. New York: Wiley. conclusion that he or she is dealing with dDd6.PassmgOn:mSocialOr- ^^ instance of metaphor, of a symbolic
. New York: Prentice-Hall. ^ ,. . 1 1 . ^ u 1

construction m which trees have been selected to 'stand for' persons (presumed human) on account of properties that . The Social Life of make them peculiarly appropriate for Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree such a role. The task, then, is to elucidate Symbolism. Oxford: Berg, xiv + 315 pp. these properties, and to show how they are made salient in the social life ofthe From 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 a in the midst ofhuman societies everywhere, social life in the sense that human beings of categories of beings to which it had do. To participate in society, the human previously paid only passing attention, person need be a symbol of nothing but Thus we'discovered'children, and animals. itself. Humans are literally social, trees Now it is the turn of trees. In each case, only metaphorically so. Yet such a disthe cause of erstwhile neglect lay not tinction seems to fly in the face of what merely in a certain empirical blindness, the people are telling us. This is that the but in prejudices deeply embedded in the tree's presence as a person is not a symbolic frameworks of received theory. Above presence, but a real, experiential one. It is all, we are heirs to a theoretical tradition there, in your environment, as a being to that - while keen to situate all intention which you relate, and which reciprocally and 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 it essential humanity. Thus the child, con- embraces relations with, and among, beceived 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 that way of its anthropomorphic treatment as used to divide the 'two worlds' of society an 'honorary' human. As for trees, the idea and nature is on the brink of collapse, can that they could really enjoy a social life we begin to glimpse the possibility of an would have struck most anthropologists, anthropology that could as readily counat least until recently, as absurd. Animals, tenance the dynamics of social life from surely, can move about in an evidently the point ofview of a non-human animal, intentional manner, and many possess or even a tree, in an environment that invoices and can see, touch and hear. But eludes humans, as from the point of view trees? ofthe human subject in an environment Starting from this theoretical premise, that includes animals and trees. The most what should an anthropologist do, con- remarkable feature of this book, which is fronted with ethnographic evidence to the outcome of a conference held in 1996 the effect that, in a certain society, trees on 'Trees and wood as social symbols', is are considered to be just like persons, or that it is poised on the watershed between even that they are persons, and possess the old anthropology and the new, yet the same properties of motility, sentience, seemingly undecided about which way
ETHNOS VOL. 64:2, I 9 9 9

Book Reviews
to turn. The tension is evident in the contradiction between the book's title. The social life of trees, and its subtitle, Anthropologicalperspectives on tree symbolism. For to ask the question, originally put to each ofthe contributors, 'To which symbolic ends have trees been used?', is already to assume that trees do not themselves have a social life, but rather play a figurative role in the social life of humans, to complement their utilitarian role in human ecology as sources of foodstuffs and raw materials. And indeed, those contributors who did address the question in this form had little or nothing to say about arboreal social life. On the other hand, those (a minority) who set out to show how the life histories of human beings and trees are truly intertwined - or how, in Schutz's memorable phrase, they 'grow older together' - did not ask how humans use trees symbolically but how they live with them relationally. Here, the social and the ecological are one and the same. This book contains some fine examples of the kind of symbolic analysis that anthropologists have always done so well, such as in the contributions by Bonnemere, Giambelli and Howell. But these 'add to the collection', as it were, rather than breaking any new ground theoretically. Moreover they risk repeating the mistakes of an older anthropology ofthe body which, as will be recalled, treated the human body as but a symbolic vehicle for meanings whose source lay in society, conceived as a disembodied realm of collective representations. Likewise an analysis of tree symbolism leads us away from the trees themselves, and back to human society, in the search for what they stand for. And in converting people's declarations of genuine feeling for trees, and grief over their destruction, into grist for its mill, symbolic analysis also defuses their political force. This is painfully evident from the fact that the only contribu-

277
tion to this volume by a green activist, Angie Zelter, actually written from a prison cell, sticks out like a sore thumb. How are we to respond to this unashamedly proselytising piece? Are we to treat Zelter like a captive informant, and analyse her writing for its symbolic content? Politically, that would be to side with her captors, What does her impassioned plea amount to, the analyst would coolly remark, but just another alternative worldview? That is all it would be for Bloch, who argues that the attribution of person-like qualities to things like trees is a function of theories' that fill the compartments of a universal but modularised human psychology. There is something almost pathetic about Bloch's increasingly desperate attempts to shore up the cognitivist paradigm, with its appeal to innate categorical predispositions, in the face of ever-mounting absurdities. He insists, for example, that all humans are disposed to regard living things as somehow special, on account of their common possession of a core property. So people in all cultures must have a concept of life. This is not to say, however, that they all mean the same by it. For many ofthe peoples whose ideas and feelings are reported in this book, life is not a property of things at all, but a word for what is going on in the whole field of relationships within which entities ofvarious kinds (including humans and trees) come into being, grow and take the forms they do. Thus life is not in trees; rather trees are in life. What makes a tree alive, then, is its placement in, openness to, and interpenetration with, a world. As Ellen rightly points out, trees are not separable from the environment in which they exist (though he wrongly goes on to suggest that this is not so for animals), In this volume, no-one brings out better the intimate intertwining and mutual responsiveness of human and arboreal life-histories than Knight, in a contribution

ETHNOS VOL. 64:2, I 9 9 9

278
dealing with the relations between foresters and their trees in upland Japan. Trees are raised in an environment of human nurturance, but once cut, they become the timbers of houses, constituting an environment of nurturance for humans. In their incorporation into the house, trees have a 'second life', which is reckoned to be as long as their first life rooted in the ground. So when trees are cut to build a house, replacements must be planted for when the house eventually has to be rebuilt. The beauty ofthe account lies not only in its reversibility (it could be written from the point of view of a tree nurtured in a human environment or vice versa), but also for the way it brings out how the life ofthe tree, which lies in the responsiveness of its substance - wood to the conditions ofthe environment (it 'breathes'), is not terminated but merely punctuated by its transformation from a 'natural' to an 'artefactual' form. The life history ofwood is not over until it eventually rots in the ground. Likewise, as Mauze reports, the cedar wood artefacts ofthe Kwakiutl ofthe American Northwest Coast are said to be alive. Moreover the transformation can work in the opposite direction as well: thus according to Fairhead and Leach, the villagers ofKissidougou in the Republic of Guinea say that rings of cotton trees are the relics of fencing stakes fi-om old garden plots, which have taken root and regrown. Moreover it is common practice among the villagers to train trees to take on particular forms. In these contributions, the idea, trumpeted elsewhere by Atran, that people everywhere make a categorical distinction between the living and the artefactual, is comprehensively refuted. They do not, and in many cases it would be virtually impossible for them to do so even if they tried! Rival, in her editorial introduction, suggests that the symbolic appeal of trees may lie in their ambiguous or uncertain

Book Reviews
status: simultaneously somewhat alive and somewhat dead, mobile and immobile, ofthe landscape and on it. Certainly, the existence of trees seems to challenge many ofthe categorical boundaries that have traditionally shaped academic inquiry, and this may partially explain their relative invisibility, up to now, in anthropological literature. But the uncertainty may be ours alone. With an alternative ontology, where life and death are but two sides of a process of creative renewal, where movement is along paths ofgrowth rather than the displacement of already completed, self-contained beings, and where the landscape is continually undergoing formation, the status of trees as crystallisations of the life process could scarcely be more certain and less ambiguous. And it may be this very certainty that makes them so significant. This significance, however, is surely not symbolic, Trees stand, they do not stand^r, and it is in their embodied presence, as it is experienced by those who live in, on, and around them, that their meaning resides. Tim Ingold University of Manchester

Vieda Skultans. 1998. The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia. London: Routledge. xxi + 217 pp. With the increased attention to the construction of memory and the ways in which the rendering ofthe past becomes a product of both the present and aspirations for the future, Vieda Skultans' book is timely and important. Skultans' work focuses on post-Soviet Latvia and, in particular, on inhabitants' narratives about loss, injustice, deportation, and exile in the period of Soviet occupation (19401991)- While the book is about events of the past, it is far less a book about history
ETHNOS VOL. 64:2, I 9 9 9