The Language of Trees – some thoughts.


I have been thinking about the language of trees.  I am thinking about what we mean when we think about trees and multilingualism. 

I have been reading Khawla's book on "Language in a Globalised World" and "How Forests Think" as well as "Matter and Desire" and 'The Heartbeat of Trees'. There is a bit of tree-hugging in this, as well as some quite clever anthropology. Spot the tree-hugger.

Khawla Badwan: moving to idea of ‘Languaging’ which has no boundaries: open, dynamic, overlapping, creative responsive, proactive, human, post-human and always in the making. (2021:7)

 

Weber (2014) Language is wild like a landscape (p.99).

 

Kohn (2013) 

Also, goal is to defamiliarize the conventional sign by revealing how it is just one of several semiotic modalities and then to explore the very different non symbolic properties of those other semiotic forms that are usually occluded by and collapsed into the symbolic in anthropological analysis. (p.15)

 

…all semiotic processes are organised around the fact that signs represent a future possible state of affairs. …The life of signs is not, then, just in the present, but also in a vague and possible future – idea of the ‘living future’  (p. 23).

 

 Old place names reveal our deep forest roots (Wohlleben 2021:119)

 

References
 
Badwan, K. (2021) Language in a Globalised World: Social Justice Perspectives on Mobility and Context.Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan
 
Kohn, E. (2013) How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
 
Weber, A. (2014) Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology. Vermont: Chelsea Green.
 
Wohlleben, P (2021) The Heartbeat of Trees. Greystone Books. 

 

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