5 - Confronting arboreal agency: reading the divine in arboreal behaviour

Summary

A recent book examining the social construction of trees in modern Britain – something the authors Jones and Cloke term ‘arbori-culture’ – urges us to cast off any anthropocentric presumptions about who or what can be agents. Trees too, they insist, need to be acknowledged as active and powerful agents, shaping the culture in which they are rooted. Moreover, in so doing the authors hope to plug what they see as a serious gap in recent anthropological and sociological scholarship:

While some conceptual approaches … have adopted a serious approach to non-human agency, there remain some significant gaps in the types of non-human agent that have been subjected to serious study. Overall, there has been a distinct preoccupation with technological materials as non-human agents, and an under-emphasis on organic non-humans whose rather more unruly agency has been neglected by comparison.

Taking a leaf out of Jones and Cloke's book, it is the ‘unruly agency’ of trees which will now come to the fore in this book. Trees of course often make shows of their agency: they grow, change colour, lose and regain leaves, wither and die. This agency is also more obvious than that of many organic but non-animal phenomena. Flowers, for example, are so much frailer and shorter-lived than trees that any displays of agency might well go unnoticed. Rocks too undoubtedly change over time, but at a rate imperceptible to the human eye. Springs and rivers make far more overt shows of their agency, but arguably enjoy fewer options than trees for expressing it. By contrast, continual changes in trees' appearance and their relatively fast growth intensify and foreground their apparent agency. As well as being obvious, the agency of trees is also ‘unruly’, in the sense that it often feels beyond human control and prediction. And it is thanks to its unruly nature that arboreal agency makes its impact on Roman religious thinking. For, as we will soon see, the unpredictable behaviour of trees prompted questions which went straight to the heart of Roman grappling with the nature and meaning of divine interference in the human world.