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| Ash trees, Thoroughsale Woods, Corby |
The following are my own notes, written when we began devising this project.
“Culture is ordinary”1– it is a lived experience, and an inherited one. Socialist writers such as
Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramsci2 defined ways in which we learn through being surrounded by cultural hegemonic
messages, which determine the way we think about things. By unpicking these
influences, Williams and Gramsci wanted to break down the inherent power systems
within them.
How does this relate to woodlands? Through
Richer’s research3
she has identified that the way people think about woodlands and about nature
is seen as ‘other’ to their own lives. Where does this attitude come from? As a
palaeoecologist, Richer understands that humans and woodlands have long been
interconnected; humans worked with woods as part of their everyday culture. So
how has the more recent notion of separating woodlands and nature from
ourselves come about?
It is important to think about this because,
as Schiffman writes, “We need a story that properly situates humans in the world —
neither above it by virtue of our superior intellect, nor dwarfed by the
universe into cosmic insignificance. We are equal partners with all that
exists, co-creators with trees and galaxies and the microorganisms in our own
gut, in a materially and spiritually evolving universe.”4 If we think of nature as
separate from ourselves, it affects the way we act in terms of issues like
climate change. We act as masters or custodians to the woods, rather than as
connected to them.
Williams uses the term “cultural
materialism”5 to discuss ideas about how our beliefs about the world are formed: that is,
through the absorption of material and mediated ideas through visual culture,
literary culture, the naming of things, the terms we use in the news and media;
these all affect, often in subconscious ways, the way we think about things and
concepts around us.
I have long been fascinated by the naming
of things. When we name something, it both reflects what we think of that
thing, and influences what others think of that thing. Naming conceptualises
how we perceive the things around us. Names also make things real. Once
something is named, you see it properly. As Robert Macfarlane writes in his
book about names, Landmarks6 “This is a book about the power of
language…to shape our sense of place… 'The hardest thing of all to see is what
is really there,’ wrote J. A. Baker in The
Peregrine (1967), a book that brilliantly shows how such seeing might occur
in language”
Richer’s research also discovered that the
naming of trees in the woods has changed over time. Fascinatingly, in the
medieval woodland, people did not name the species of trees; instead, they
called them by names for their use. For example, the hazel and the birch were
known as “poles” because their straight grains made them ideal for making
staffs. Now that you know this, you will see hazel and birch differently from
now on!
But these colloquial names have been lost
to us over time. As our perception of woods and trees changed, affecting our
use of language for them, thus our words for them further shaped our sense of
them.
Dr Mark Jenner at the University of York
has written about Culture and Communication7
and how, if the concept of cultural materialism is correct, then our culture is
communicated through much wider fields than that of the arts and humanities: “More interesting
is the way sociologists and anthropologists have used the term culture much
more inclusively in order to make sense of sets of shared meanings, of
communication practices and ways of life”8.
Jenner advocates that people working within different disciplines including the
arts, sciences, history etc. must work together to discover how cultural
communication of ideas, such as the perceptions of our woodlands, come about. More importantly, how can this knowledge be utilised to engage people more meaningfully with issues such
as climate change and other global issues, which can be extremely difficult for
people to grasp or conceive of fully, and especially difficult to relate to
their everyday lives?
Our
project with the woodlands aims to address these two things: 1. What are the perceptions and daily
relationships that people have now to their woodlands? and 2. How can artists
and scientists work together to formulate cultural materialism which engages
people more meaningfully about the complexity of woodlands?
You can sign up for email updates for the Imagining Woodlands project at this link, or follow on twitter @imagwoods
1 Raymond Williams, Culture is Ordinary (1958), in Resources of Hope, R. Gable (ed.) London and New York, Verso, 1989
2 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers, 1971
3 Richer, S and Gearey, B, ‘From Rackam to REVEALS: thinking towards a palaeoecology of woodland dwelling’, Environmental Archaeology, 2017
4 Richard Schiffman, March 2, 2015, We Need to Relearn That We’re a Part of Nature, Not Separate From It: http://billmoyers.com/2015/03/02/bigger-science-bigger-religion/
5 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, Chatto and Windus, 1958
6 Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks, Penguin Books, 2015
7 Dr Mark Jenner, Research Champion for Culture and Communication http://www.york.ac.uk/research/themes/culture-and-communication/mark-jenner/
8 Jenner, ibid
