Laura Rival - The Social Life of Trees

Series Editors: Paul Gilroy, Michael Herzfeld and Danny Miller

First published 1998 by Berg Publishers

Published 2020 by Routledge

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Laura Rival 1998

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ISBN 13: 978-1-8597-3923-5 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-8597-3928-0 (pbk)

3.1 Habits of various standing palms

3.2 European representations of palms

3.3 Relationship between palms and the category tree in symbolic and morphological classifications

3.4 Tree forms, selected to indicate range of types

3.5 Plant morphotypes

4.1 The Otunga Tree of Bwiti on which He Who Sees God was hung

4.2 The Great Oak of Oviedo

4.3 Tree Diagram of the Hierarchy of Being

4.4 Haeckels evolutionary tree

4.5 The circularity or self-constitution of the tree of knowledge

4.6 The tree of knowledge

6.1 Tapis of a young coconut tree

6.2 A married couple clothing a coconut palm during the Tumpek Pengatag festival

8.1 Lineage deities of Koolatattu Nayars

8.2 The Koolatattu Durga temple and its two realms

9.1 Grandfather, grandson and a forest plantation

9.2 Japanese preference for wooden houses

13.1 Map of Midnapore district, West Bengal, India

3.1 The status of palms as trees in selected languages of tropical and sub-tropical peoples

3.2 Presence or absence of generic terms for standing palms in selected languages

6.1 Differences between classificatory terms associated with living and cut trees

6.2 Correspondences between parts of the coconut plant and body parts and between the Balinese terms used to refer to each of them

6.3 Use of the coconut as container of human body parts or as representative of the human body and soul to mark the progress of human life from birth to death and deification

6.4 Summary of the characteristic elements used to perform pangurp miwah pasupatian and their referents according to Howe and Nusa Penida people

8.1 Trees in or near kaaviis, their ritual use, and types

8.2 The nature of Nayar and Untouchable ancestor spirits

This book is the outcome of an original question To which symbolic ends have trees been used? put to a number of anthropologists in January 1996 at a conference on Trees and Wood as Social Symbols. The goal of the conference was to address the social dimension of tree symbolism in different societies and cultures, and, more specifically, the extent to which trees are used as symbols of transgenerational continuity. Well aware of the condemnation of cross-cultural analysis of symbolic - or social - structures by both postmodernist and cognitive anthropologists who agree, albeit for very different reasons, that such endeavour can only result in arbitrary findings, we nevertheless felt that presenting detailed and original ethnographies of the ways in which trees are used to symbolise human existence and human society in various regions of the world was a useful intellectual exercise. By the end of the conference, we had, not a well-crafted cross-cultural comparative model describing tree symbolism and explaining its variation, but the clear picture of a recurrent theme, the vitality and power of self-regeneration of trees. Of course, what we loosely call tree symbolism is a complex cultural representation composed of different kinds of knowledge. More detailed explorations of local systems of meaning, as well as comparative work, is needed to confirm the hypothesis that trees everywhere and at all times have been associated with the organic force of life.