How Forests of Qualia Emerge

Abstract

This article analyses an environmentalist activity known as forest therapy in a suburb of Tokyo and formulates qualia as a rhematic textual process semiotically calibrating an encounter with forests in such a way that its effects seem raw, natural, or “unmediated.” In particular, it ethnographically demonstrates how a distinctive cooccurrence style of Japanese language use, involving ideophones and euphonic forms with various diminutive effects during forest therapy interactions, becomes a perceivable object of the senses qua discursive form, whose effects—which are not natural but naturalizing—further equips participants in forest therapy sessions to apperceive and discursively specify the attributes of other perceivable things, now taken to be “immediate” sensuous truths, through a process whose effects Peirce captions as qualia, or facts of firstness. The article further reveals that such a naturalized—and thus therapeutic—encounter with forests is figurated through various rhematic, text-metrical patterns that rely on specific discursive resources, which cumulatively diagram agents’ affective attunements to a nonhuman forest world, while enacting transspecies engagement with animals and “fictionalizing” the (lost) animistic linkage in the Anthropocene with “wildness” through their bodies as phatic nexus.

Recalling the nonhumanistic—nonlinguistic—orientation or “turn” in contemporary anthropology, this article (re)focuses on the issue of language use to approach the chiasmic keystone between so-called nomothetisch and idiographisch phenomena—nature and culture, nonhumans and humans, and so on—and seeks ethnographically to reveal how the relationality between nonhumans and humans semiotically arises through forms of language use in a genred and enregistered communicative interaction. I employ and develop a Peircean semiotic insight—qualia—which has been incorporated into the ethnographic inquiry as a methodological pathway to access experiences with material entities or the emergence of firstness,¹ and reformulate qualia as a rhematic textual process semiotically calibrating an encounter with forests in such a way that its effects seem raw, natural, or “unmediated.” Even more radically, it is not felt as linguistic, cultural, or semiotic at all but as “immediate” sensuous truth (Harkness 2022, 59).

In particular, I analyze an environmentalist activity known as forest therapy (in which participants attend a lecture on the therapeutic efficacy of a forest, enter the forest at night, and lie on the ground) and demonstrate how a distinctive cooccurrence style of Japanese language use, involving ideophones and euphonic forms with various diminutive effects during forest therapy interactions, becomes a perceivable object of the senses qua discursive “form,” whose effects—which are not natural but naturalizing—further equip participants to discursively and “naturally” specify the attributes of other sensuously perceivable things in a particular way as a result of participating in interactions. That is a process whose effects Peirce captions as qualia, or facts of firstness (EP 2.272). In fact, the words and expressions selected and uttered during forest therapy describe sensations and depict them with various diminutives through poetic, text-metrical patterns, which cumulatively diagrams agents’ affective attunements to a nonhuman forest world, while enacting transspecies (Kohn 2014) engagement as voicing effects between humans and animals and “fictionalizing” the (lost) animistic linkage with nature as “wildness” through their bodies as phatic nexus. A certain number of agents gather in a suburb plateau region, which is moderately distant from cities, and participate in forest therapy sessions both in encountering such narrations and also in encountering the “natural” phenomena being depicted and described through them, (re)producing as its effects a certain type of people with a certain “taste” to the other things. Thus, I contend that qualia are rather a potential quality space, or rhematic textual process, generated through and saturated within the course of genred and enregistered communicative interactions, which yields a typification process equipping interlocutors to sensuously perceive them as natural encounters with nature. This is the central ethnographic fact the discussions below bring forward, through which I further explore ways of theorizing the human and nonhuman nexus—the issue of Boasian categorical apperception—which also allow us to semiotically merge the fields of environmental, linguistic/semiotic, and ontological anthropology.

“Turn” and Realism

In the Anthropocene—an age of environmental crisis—the importance of rethinking and reconstructing the interrelationship between humans and the natural environment has been robustly discussed in many fields. In political and historical ecology and the environmental sociological and anthropological fields, for instance, through investigation of environmentalist engagements for preservation and conservation, the natural environment has been analyzed and conceptualized as inherently ethical, political, cultural, and ideological; locally situated in communities; and historically transforming through the process of negotiation among various social agents.²

Further, the so-called ontological turn has gained a substantial presence in recent sociocultural anthropology as a critical response to anthropocentrism, that is, the culture/nature dichotomy and other equipollent oppositions in modern anthropological premise (Henare et al. 2007). It indicates that modern Western anthropology arises through various dualisms, such as subject/object, self/other, interior/exterior, science/indigenous knowledge, or erklären/verstehen, which instantiates an epistemological—humanistic—approach for representing the latter, that is, Ding-an-sich, in a way that is as “transparent” (or perhaps unmediated) as possible. In such a framework, however, the latter unavoidably emerges as a reversed image of the former, the ethnographic description of which only becomes a route of self-discovery to secure the roots by reconfirming the unbridgeable divide between self and other, observation and participation, or ethnography and field reality. Such attempts of cultural description at realism—or the formula of Malinowski centrism—imply, in advance, the consequence of self-reflexively generating the same dualisms and failing to identify the location of the real. Ontologically attuned anthropology intends to turn away from such a Western epistemological, humanistic framework to represent a cultural reality as realism and seeks an alternative approach that can uncover the real—that is, the process through which the relationality between subject and object, self and other, culture and nature, human and nonhuman, or semiotic entities of any sort, emerge. In this sense, this ontological “turn” of anthropology allegedly arises as a semiotic—thus nonhumanistic—approach of the ethnographic inquiry to others. Such a theoretical orientation has been particularly elaborated through discussions of dwelling, animism, perspectivism, multinaturalism, multispecies ethnography, and anthropology beyond the human, incorporating Peircean insights into its ethnographic analysis.³

“Provincializing” Language; or, Language Remains Saussurean Just When Nonlanguage Is Rendered Peircean

Here, let us briefly review the way in which the tradition of ontological anthropology semiologically (mis)construes the role of language use in human/nonhuman affairs. Although this tradition incorporates the Peircean trichotomies into its analysis of the cultural process through which humans and nonhumans arise as semiotic entities, its own attempt to apply such insights to language use and communicative interaction within ethnographic settings is not yet sufficiently developed. Since language is perceived by writers in this tradition (1) as something whose dominant and fundamental elements are its symbolic, abstract, or arbitrary features (which Saussure ascribed to the abstraction he called langue) and (2) as something which is perhaps distinctive to humans (as Saussure’s followers have maintained), any contemporary analysis of language use and communicative interaction tends to be regarded as a methodology that exemplifies a Western epistemological and human-centered framework of cultural description, whether alleged to have roots in Saussure or Kant, or alleged to have possible origins in Boasian anthropological holism (Kohn 2015, 314). Thus, any ethnographic analysis with a focus on language, communication, or any allegedly “linguistic” phenomena, is somehow treated as if it exclusively highlights “humans” and excludes nonhuman entities from its analytical scope. In fact, the act of calling its own endeavor as one of “provincializing” language and communication (Kohn 2013, 38) reveals a quintessential token of residual linguistic ideologies, which appear to derive from a semiological dyadic framework in which language is assumed to communicate abstract propositional sense alone, and the capacity of language users to use language to refer to concrete entities in the universe around them is ignored. Thus, language and communication have become the methodological chiasmus for incorporating Peircean semiotics into a sociocultural domain that, oddly enough, excludes them.⁴

Needless to say, Franz Boas was aware of the methodological opposition of Neo-Kantianisms within German intellectual traditions, that is, of Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften,⁵ and conceived of anthropology as a science that integrates and encompasses both methodologies (1887, 138; cf. Agha 2007). Following the Humboldtian tradition, Boas termed such an attempt cosmography and grounded the descriptive linguistic analysis of sounds and grammatical categories in Native American languages—the primacy of categorical apperception—as its keystone (1911; cf. Silverstein 2004a).⁶ Besides, as Roman Jakobson (1957) successfully employed Peircean semiotics into the theorization of language and communication, language has been long understood as unavoidably indexical, and its structure is also (meta)pragmatically constructed, anchored to the deictic center (i.e., origo),⁷ of speech event through shifters (i.e., denotational indexical duplex). It is also a multifunctional phenomenon, emerging in its speech event and recursively contributing to entextualize such an event, or message, in the pragmatic present (Jakobson 1960). Thus, Jakobson opened a methodological pathway that allows us to systematically incorporate Peircean semiotics—and thus to link the nomothetische to the idiographische, so to speak—in pursuing the linguistic analysis of communicative events through attention to indexicality (Caton 1987).

In this sense, if Kohn’s Amazonian ethnography, for example, employs Peircean semiotics to call for an “anthropology beyond the human” through challenging the dichotomies of Saussurean linguistics (continuously, through its Bloomfieldean and Chomskyan phases), it seems incredibly odd that it neither discusses nor even refers to either Jakobsonian semiotic formulation of language and communication or the series of methodological discussions in Boasian tradition of linguistics, which resulted in the launch of four-field anthropology. Although both studies (i.e., Boasian linguistics and Jakobsonian semiotics⁸) seem to be labeled as “humanistic” in the sense that they are grounded in the analysis of language (Kohn 2013, 8–9; 2014, 5; 2015, 311–15), such an approach to what is “beyond the human”—a metapragmatic caption for the realm of nature, material, body, sense, or the nonhuman devised by “turning” away from abstract “language” (or Saussurean langue), while ignoring concrete events of perceivable language use—indicates, ironically enough, that Kohn’s allegedly semiotic ethnography itself adopts and self-reflexively reproduces an outdated semiological framework.

Qualia as Facts of Firstness

Recognizing such a “disciplinary agenda” as provincializing language and its slippery dance between semiology and semiotics in contemporary anthropology, I squarely focus on the issue of language use and communicative interaction to approach the chiasmic keystone between nomothetisch and idiographisch, nature and culture, or nonhumans and humans, employing and further developing a Peircean semiotic concept, qualia, that has been incorporated into the ethnographic inquiry to methodologically make it possible to access the emergence of firstness in anthropological discussions.

Qualia are facts of firstness (EP 2.272). In particular, Peirce enunciated what he called a semiotic phaneroscopy and indicated that events and actions create the basis of knowledge, aesthetics, and the historical evolution of life forms and the universe. Occurring hic et nunc, they are inherently attributed with certain qualities and features in themselves that remain hypothetical as abstract potentialities until they instantiate in signs. These qualitative potentialities are instantiated and thus emerge as qualia, taken to be sensuous instances of such qualities, while they are inherently typified through and into enregistered and genred interactions organized around hypostatically abstracted and culturally valorized qualisigns (Gal 2016, 132; Harkness 2017, S34). Hence, qualia are rather a sensuous typification process of being experienceable “forms” of qualities, thus firstness appearing under its form of secondness—that is, facts of firstness (qualities, instantiated or embodied in entities or events)—logically posited between qualities as firstness (abstract, uninstantiated properties or attributes) and qualisigns as thirdness (as linking an object with an interpretant in a sign) (Chumley and Harkness 2013, 5–6). Let us also recall that this typification process of firstness (features and qualities), to be experientially “formed” and sensuously “felt,” operates through rhemes as a mode of interpretant, reflexively calibrating the sign to the sign’s quality or character itself. As Nakassis (2019) points out, such a reflexive sign-process to the sign itself can be explicated with the insight of well-known Jakobsonian poetics: “Rather, the aesthetic function focalizes signs as sign-vehicles, which is to say, to use the Peircean terms, as sinsigns (or tokens) phenomenal, palpable forms in their existence in time and space—and thus qualisigns—signs whose semiotic function devolves to their imputed qualities. The poetic function, thus, is a reflexive metasemiotic function calibrating the sign to its own sensuous material form qua form” (69).⁹ Thus, rhemes are self-figurative, self-standing, or self-contained effects qua “form” in the process of a broader metasemiosis of qualitative potentialities, through which a sign becomes a unitarily metricalized, socially established, and thus enregistered and genred interactionally textualized whole. Obviously, this is the effectiveness of rituals and ritualization—that is, Silverstein’s concept of “indexical-iconicity” (1992, 321; 1993, 52), which stems from the explicit metricality (i.e., reflexive textuality or unity) following multilayered poetic structures deployed in parallelism (i.e., projected axes of selection) throughout the interaction: “Ritual is self-grounding as an indexical-icon within its figured universe and, as such, makes a strong, though semiotically implicit case for what can only be called an ideological order within a culture. The site of institutionalized ritual and ritualization, then, provides an essential place where societies and social groups in effect articulate the ideological” (1992, 321). More specifically, a ritual emerges as a rhematic iconic legisign in the (meta)textual process in Peircean terminology and thus “diagrammatically” epitomizes a certain conventional type (macrocosm as the nomically calibrated realm) of experience as a token (microcosm calibrated as the empirical realm) (Stasch 2011). In this sense, qualia (or, better, a quale) figure in effect as a part, or an element, of this self-figurative, unitary, thus rhematic (meta)textual process—diagrammatic configuration of occurring event and practice—which calibrates the event and practice to its form as its given (or natural) possibility, thus tone, through invoking the comparison and predication as projected axes of selection of socially conventionalized values (Gal 2017, S143).

The methodological significance of approaching qualia in ethnographic studies exists at this point. That is, it encompasses the rhematic sign figuration, or the domain of firstness, in relation to secondness and thirdness among the Peircean trichotomy; thus, it signifies the semiotic textual process of typification of tone entokened (Harkness 2020, 5). It allows us to empirically analyze a sensory, material, bodily, noncultural, nonhumanistic, “natural” domain (tone) as sensuous encounters and feelings (token), which interactionally, ritually, and culturally entail particular events and practices (type). This approach also serves as an attempt to critically engage in, further elaborate, or possibly reconfigure both Boasian and Jakobsonian approaches to semiosis focalizing the primacy of categorical apperception—that is, the issue of language use for ontologically attuned ethnography. Harkness succinctly formulates this point: “We can say that qualia are some of the semiotic effects that feel the least semiotic because they are reflexively apperceived as raw or unmediated feelings of encounter with the natural or given properties (i.e., “qualities”) of what there is to experience. … In the ethnographic analysis of qualia, much of the problem revolves not merely around asking how culture shapes experience, nor even asking how culture makes experience possible, but, even more radically, how culture shapes experience in such a way that it doesn’t seem cultural” (2022, 59). I shall credit the development of the qualia project in anthropology from the initial qualia framing as “instantiation” of quality, which was somewhat reductive and simplistic, to the further developed treatment of them as facts of firstness, which is not merely the Aristotelian qualification, that is, the analysis of salient lexemes and their hypostatic abstractions, but rather the process, space, or “domain” of an experiential condensation qua representamenal unity at the far reaches of the genuine sign itself.¹⁰ Grounded at this semiotic understanding of firstness as a rhematic sign-process, I demonstrate that language use through various ideophones and euphonic forms of Japanese serves itself as a perceivable object or “forms” of the senses qua diminutives and diminution (or infantilization) and further equips its interlocutors and “diagrams” their sensuous attunements to discursively specify the attributes of other sensuously perceivable things (see also Manning 2012, 24).

Forest Therapy and Wilderness

The environmentalist activity called forest therapy is also known and practiced as a part of nature interpretation. Nature interpretation stems from the activities carried out by naturalists such as Mills (1870–1922), Tilden (1883–1980), and others who worked as guides for visitors to introduce the natural environment in the Rocky Mountains from the end of the nineteenth century (Nash 1969, 189). Today such guides, called nature interpreters (hereafter represented as NI; see also Satsuka 2015),¹¹ provide visitors with opportunities for various firsthand experiences within a natural environment. These activities were deeply associated with the environmentalism of American modernity, which was initiated with the Transcendentalism of Thoreau and Emerson in the East and later developed in the Midwest and further in the “Great” West by John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, and Edward Abbey, and others (Nash 1990; cf. Cronon 1991).¹² Such a genealogy of “deep-ecological” thoughts provides a historical background for the investigation of the metapragmatics of nature-experience elsewhere, such as in Japan, as the following discussion clarifies.

Below, I examine forest therapy as a part of a nature interpretation activity in Japan, which is conducted in Imidas (a pseudonym). Imidas is a well-known Japanese institution for environmental education located in the plateau region in the Yamanashi prefecture. It was founded in 1938 by an American missionary who came to Japan as a committee member to rebuild the local YMCA, which was destroyed by an earthquake in the Kanto region. In 1945, the missionary realized that cultivating mountainous areas and reviving farming villages were crucial for reconstructing a postwar Japan based on democracy. He built a model rural farming center based on the Brotherhood of St. Andrew’s training camp and established an educational experiment project for introducing highland farming in this region.¹³

In 1986, Imidas established the Environmental Education Division, which provides nature-experience programs for visitors and plans environmental projects in cooperation with corporations, governmental agencies, and educational institutions. Recently, multiple scholars in sociology, education, and politics have collaborated with Imidas to launch various nature-experience programs. I conducted fieldwork in Imidas from 2006 to 2007. Most participants in the nature-experience programs, including myself, came from urban areas in the Kanto region of Japan. For several days, we stayed in lodges and participated in a variety of nature-experience programs, including indoor lectures on the relationship between body, mind, and the natural environment, collaboratively conducted by NIs and medical doctors, and outdoor poetry writing activities, or qigong, in the forest adjacent to the lodge.

To provide additional context surrounding forest therapy: the Forestry Agency of the Japanese government established “forest therapy bases” (森林セラピー基地) in 2005 as part of its accreditation process, referring to places where forest bathing—which, according to “scientific/medical evidence,” has preventive medical effects (see also Satsuka 2015, 151–54)—can take place. It set up a nonprofit organization called the Forest Therapy Society to implement this project and has certified areas as forest therapy bases all over Japan. Although Imidas itself has not been certified yet as such a base, several nearby plateau regions in Yamanashi prefecture have been designated bases. Such an accreditation process indicates that forest therapy, or nature-experience, has been increasingly institutionalized, thus becoming a product of “social value projects” (Agha 2011). This indicates that qualic experiences taking place in the forest—interactions that are supposed to, or not supposed to, take place—at Imidas are likely to be framed within a larger institutionally configured reality on various types of values. The discussion below also unfolds; the forest therapy session in Imidas hosts the lecture on the therapeutic efficacy of forest to demonstrate the effects, or scientific evidentiality, of preventative medicines of forest (fig. 1).

Figure 1. A forest around Imidas. This image was provided by Imidas.

Entering the Dark Forest

Below, I examine a forest therapy session,¹⁴ which is one of those nature-experience activities in Imidas. Before entering the forest, approximately 20 participants gathered in a hall in their lodge for a half-hour lecture on the efficacy of forest therapy in holistic medicine by a psychosomatic doctor who runs a medical clinic in Akasaka, Tokyo. In this lecture, the following aspects were explained using PowerPoint slides:

1. 1. What is forest therapy?

   It was initially developed in Germany in the nineteenth century: for example, Sebastian Kneipp’s natural remedies (i.e., the natural cure movement),¹⁵ which primarily use plants such as herbs and aromas but do not use medicine.

   It improves people’s lifestyle by creating a holistic awareness of the human body and health, including diet, exercise, rest, and relief from mental stress. It is a part of holistic medicine, as patients enhance their spontaneous capacity to heal their own bodies.

2. 2. Why is forest therapy good for health?

   The forest stimulates bodily senses when participants hear the creek murmuring, touch the bark, feel the woodchip trail, and smell tree nuts and mushrooms.

   The forest is filled with volatile substances called phytoncides, which are emitted from coniferous trees, that inhibit bacteria and other microorganisms. When humans breathe them in, they have refreshing effects on their bodies.

   There was a case showing that a 40-minute forest bathing session reduced the amount of the mental stress hormone called cortisol. Forest therapy suppresses sympathetic nerve activity, which is one of the autonomic nerves and has an excitatory effect.¹⁶

   By entering the forest, a person’s balance of autonomic nerves can be improved by 70 percent, and mental anxieties can be controlled as the immune system becomes activated.

3. 3. What is good about the forest around Imidas?

   Coniferous trees are present, and therefore phytoncides are abundant in the forest air.

   It is flat and easy for people to walk through. Various activities, such as lying in the woods, walking barefoot, and looking up at the sky, are possible.

In this lecture, the doctor emphasized that the forest around Imidas was filled with phytoncides, which stimulate the senses of the human body, suppress sympathetic nerve activity, relieve mental stress, and thus holistically heal the body.¹⁷ Hence, the participants became keenly aware that the forest they were entering was a therapeutic space-time medically and scientifically proven to reduce bodily and mental stress and that walking in and directly experiencing forests through the five senses would promote good health (see also Lindfors 2021). After the lecture, the NI and participants left for the forest at around 8:00 p.m. Transcript 1 contains the NI’s opening remark of the forest therapy when they gathered in front of the lodge:

Transcript 1

Here, the NI’s narrative entextualizes the forest as a space-time for wildlife (i.e., animals), possibly generating its comparison to the lodge as a sphere for large mammals (i.e., humans), accompanied by light (dazzling) and darkness, as if those mammals as humans “invade” the dark wild world with light, thus “enlightening” the darkness. Notably, when the NI described the sheer darkness of the forest, she used the words mak-kuran kuran (真っ くらん くらん), which denotationally means “absolutely dark and dark.” While highlighting the darkness of the forest, the repetition of the adjective dark seems to have a diminutive effect somehow attributing a round contour to and animating the night forests with such a character, and thus possibly weakening the fearfulness of the night forests by using the euphonic form kura-n, kura-n, in contrast to the basic form of this adjective verb, kura-i. This usage of the euphonic form and its repetition may also evoke the so-called motherese (i.e., the parental language used with children) or perhaps an anime-character register in Japanese, attributing somehow the infantile and adorable quality both to the darkness of the forest and to its interlocutor herself. The dark, wild, and slightly scary forest of animals cloaked with fog at night is animated and transformed qua a “form” of a little round, childlike, and possibly approachable space-time for the large mammals, or humans. In addition, arriving at the entrance to the forest, the NI asked the participants if they hear any sound from the forest and imitated water dripping slowly and gently by repeating the onomatopoeic word pota, pota.¹⁸ These syllables maximize the contrast in the sound sonority: being combined with consonants of the least sonorous sounds (prototypes of consonants) within the sonority hierarchy (i.e., [p] and [t]), the low vowels with the most sonorous sounds (prototypes of vowels), and the medium vowels (i.e., [o] and [a]). Thus, the repetition of [po-ta] with vowel elongation begets a highly perceivable shape and sound of water, thus sensuously salient as dropping drip by drip in the silent forest. Discursively linked and sensuously activated to the qualitative elements of forests through the use of ideophones, the participants finally entered such a qualitative forest space-time. In the forests, the NI encouraged the participants to take a deep breath and find a comfortable place on the ground to lie down. Transcript 2 provides the NI’s explanation when all the participants arrived in the middle of the forest:

Transcript 2

Here, the NI encouraged the participants to be aware of their bodily senses and guided them to see the sky, hear the raindrop, feel the moisture, and smell the damp, “pleasant” air of the forest at night, thus charting a structured space of experience in the following order: (1) eyesight ⇒ (2) hearing ⇒ (3) touching ⇒ (4) smelling. Exploiting rhythmically these different senses one after another, the NI directed the participants to go deeper into the natural world, bringing a congruent projection of external space into the interior of the participants’ bodies through the respiratory system—perhaps filled with phytoncides from coniferous trees. The NI did not linguistically elucidate how the air in the night forest is “pleasant” (ii-kanji 良い感じ); but it was made ineffable instead, and the participants had to learn to sensuously (but not ideologically) specify the textural difference between the air and pleasantness as ii-kanji. They seem to be directed through this discursive route to find or “extract” their deeper selves, or roots—an indexically saturated and semiotically unmediated feeling of nature in bodies. After NI’s explanation, participants were asked to lie on their backs on the ground for about 15 minutes:

Here, quoting the psychosomatic doctor’s “scientific” explanation in the lecture on forest therapy, the NI’s reported speech reconfirms the therapeutic efficacy from firsthand contact with the forest to the human health and mind: “simple, but the best.” The NI, in turn, let the participants find comfortable places to lie down, their back touching the ground in the middle of the forest, and spend time quietly alone. They were encouraged to be a “simple” existence as a body or become a part of the soil, nonhuman, or Ding-an-sich, touching and sensing its cold, rugged surface texture with the entire body through the spine in the dark, silent forest, distant from the noisy, dazzling, stressful, humanistic realm.

Accordingly, to create such a “simple” nonhuman space-time, while the participants lay on the ground for approximately 15 minutes, the NI mostly stayed “silent” (which made for a noticeable contrast with other sections in the program during which she robustly depicted the qualitative features of the forest) and let the participants not hear human language, lying apart from each other, or other humans. Although such poetic distribution between “talking” and “silence” is more vividly observable when compared with daytime forest therapy, such a metapragmatic switching between them within this nighttime program undoubtedly served to discursively enact the participants’ natural experience with nature in a dark silent forest. During this activity, the NI further provided an emblematic utterance in regard to the linkage between humans and a nonhuman world, as seen in the following:

Transcript 3

Here, the NI encouraged the participants to feel the natural environment by (a) “touching this air of the natural world” (shizenkai no kono kuki ni furenagara 自然界のこの空気に触れながら), as well as to be aware of their bodily senses and possibly to internalize the external by (b) “going inside of themselves” (jibun no naka ni hairi nagara 自分の中に入りながら).

A clear parallel structure emerges between a and b, contrastively conceptualizing the natural world (shizen-kai 自然界) and yourself (jibun 自分) but mutually presupposing each other; and notably, this kind of parallelism recurrently emerges throughout the forest therapy at Imidas (see transcript 7). Thus, the comparability and iconism between the dichotomized domains, that is, nature and human, is maximized and foregrounded in effect through the parallelism, synaesthetically allowing the participants to “touch” (fureru 触れる) the inside of their bodies, as they are touching the outside “air” (kuki 空気) of the natural world (see also Nozawa 2015).¹⁹ The participants were directed to isolate themselves from any kinds of nonphysical, nonphatic, and presumably human connections and to experience the sensation as if the “exterior” (nonhuman) and the “interior” (human) were turned inside out, being physically and materially contiguous with nature at their bodies as the phatic chiasmus—a “figure-ground reversal” (Wagner 1987, 62).²⁰ In other words, the NI directed them to metamorphose from a human being in the here and now to a cosmic being out there, as if encountering nature/others (shizen 自然) is equivalent to discovering human/selves (jibun 自分).²¹ The NI instructed the participants to get inside the natural world and also to discover nature in their deeper selves—that is, a semiotically unmediated, downshifted, contact with wildness, thus otherness, in themselves, a quale (see also Parmentier 1994).

While all the participants lay quietly on the ground, they heard wildlife. The NI explained that when she came into the forest for a preview, she heard a deer’s voice, and imitated its cry, putting stress on this onomatopoeic word, kane, kane , with a high-pitched voice, and thus framing it as belonging to a faraway animal realm through a citational device (i.e., ‑tteiu っていう) in the past tense (i.e., ‑kikimashita 聞きました). In this sense, this onomatopoeic utterance differs from the one with pota, pota, which imitated the sound and shape of water dropping. Explicitly changing the phonetic tone to the high-pitched one, the NI rather metapragmatically quoted the deer as an animator²² and acted as its shamanistic human (Du Bois 1986, 328). She let the participants feel the immediate presence of nonhumans in the forest, while also indexing and underlining the difference between the presented and the presenter, or the animated and the animator. Such modulations from “culture” to “nature” via pitch, parallelism/reduplication, or onomatopoeia serve as a compounding miniritual of animalistic instantiation. The participants do not merely hear the sound of animals; they also encounter the voice of wildlife, which is a voiceless entity in the Anthropocene that humans can access or “touch” only when they become unmediated to nature, or “simply” exist as a material entity in the dark, silent forest away from its adjacency pair—the dazzling, verbally mediated world of cities and towns (fig. 2).²³

Figure 2. A participant lying down on the ground in the forest at Imidas. This image was provided by Imidas.

In this forest therapy interaction, onomatopoeia clearly serves as a type of poetic and aesthetic language (Asai 2015, 15–18). The typical examples, such as papa and mama, repeat syllables with maximal sonority contrast between consonants and vowels (Jakobson 1960). In this sense, onomatopoeic words and expressions are figuratively foregrounded and thus, through such effects, become highly recognizable as self-contained unitary signs qua their form, shape, contour, of their own quality and character: “The poetic function points up that signs are—as a function of their embodied bundling of qualities—always multiplex, internally fractionated such that they may typify themselves; which is to say that the aesthetic quality, or poetic functionality, of any sign (or stretch of signs) projects, if only potentially or virtually, textuality—relations of indexical co-occurrence and iconic coherence” (Nakassis 2019, 69–70).

Therefore, poetic languages can cooccur as diminutives, that is, rhemes, which reflexively calibrate the sign to its own quality (i.e., embodied bundling of qualities). Although onomatopoeic words and expressions are often presumed as the natural and transparent reflection of human bodily and innate sensations, for the present purpose of semiotic discussion on quality as facts of firstness along with the Boasian conception of categorical apperception, what is particularly important is that the association of onomatopoeia with the qualic experience of environmental, material, nonhuman entities is not “natural” but, rather, “naturalizing” (Asai 2015, 17–18; cf. Chumley 2017, S5). Onomatopoeia is indeed perceived as the linguistic reflection of subjective, introspective, and sensory experience, and thus an example of unmediated, motivated, nonarbitrary phenomena of language. Such a phenomenon, or phenomenology, is semiotically explicable as an effect of its rhematic textualization on firstness occurring within a broader metapragmatic, communicative, and sociocultural (thus intersubjective and interdiscursive) process. In other words, it is a semiotic process of genuine signs descending on and condensing in the quale as momentary semiotic suspension “below” the domain of genuine signs (Harkness 2022, 73). Accordingly, onomatopoeia has the effect of naturalizing (i.e., rhematizing) an occurring event and thus semiotically generating the “least semiotic” experience, so to speak, in the sense that it is apperceived as an unmediated, motivated, or nonarbitrary property in real-time communication.²⁴ Even more radically, they do not appear as indexes at all—not even ideologically “felt” as semiotic—but as a sensuous truth.

After experiencing a simple, phatic, but cosmic linkage with the natural and chemical world, the NI and the participants left the forest and headed back to the lodge. Transcript 4 contains the NI’s remarks on returning to the forest’s edge:

Transcript 4

The therapeutic efficacy of this interactional text seems to materialize as the tropic effect of the two events: (a) The lecture on forest therapy (natural cure) by a psychosomatic doctor; and (b) The journey into the forest to perceive the efficacy taught in the lecture. Specifically, this journey serves as a sensuous metamorphic passage to experience a wide range of senses and become aware of a phatic, simple linkage with the wildness through or in the body as a deictic nexus. That is, the participants (1) depart for that dark forest at night; (2) see, hear, smell, touch, and breathe natural sensations into the body in the deep forest; (3) feel unmediated with nature and become nonhuman “out there”; and (4) return to this bright human lifeworld (shaba 娑婆) of electricity.²⁵ The participants develop an awareness of their physical immediacy with nature and their bodily senses, acquiring the skill to hear the voice of wild animals or a voice of their bodies—that is, to feel, touch, and thus “extract” wildness and animality in themselves, or a quale “of” nature as a singular, unitary, and momentary suspension in semiosis below the domain of genuine signs. Figure 3 shows the metamorphic form of this sensuous encounter with senses, wildness, and animality in humans, or “the others in the selves,” designed to experience this therapeutic efficacy (see also Silverstein 2004b, 2006).²⁶

Figure 3. Sensuous route of forest therapy

Transspecies Engagement

Another example of forest therapy to be examined below was conducted with the same NI and participants in a forest setting from 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Here, I focus on the human-animal interaction that unfolded when the NI and participants encountered a black large-breed dog rushing toward them during the guided walk through the forest. By showing how the NI and the participants cooperatively managed this indexically contingent contact with an animal, I demonstrate how the transspecies encounter between humans and animals is deictically enacted through the origo transposition and how the “animistic” genre and register framing of this discursive text—which seems to consistently regiment, conventionalize, and even institutionalize different instances of environmental activities and projects at Imidas—is interactionally generated and achieved through the activity.

In this activity, the NI and participants walked into the daytime forest outside their lodge and the participants were encouraged to be conscious of all the bodily senses and actively use them. The NI led the participants deeper into the forest by explaining the characteristics of plants and small animals walking along its woodchip trail. This activity followed the similar threefold ritual structuring employed for the night forest therapy: (1) leaving the ordinary human realm, (2) stepping into the nonhuman forest world to actively use all the bodily senses, and (3) returning to the outside of the forest. After about an hour, as they were passing through a dense part of the forest, the dog suddenly rushed toward them along the narrow trail:

Transcript 5

In transcript 5, the utterance ❶ “it has come” (kita 来た) indicates the completion of the arrival of something in the past (perfect tense), but here it refers to something in a progressive state approaching the deictic origo of communication. Obviously, this usage of the perfect tense implies that events that are (not) expected to happen have occurred sensationally, creating a sense of urgency in the group. Immediately after that, the NI used an imperative to address the dog ❷ “Wait” (mate 待て) as if it were moving away from the origo, which therefore indicated that the deictic center was transposed to a position chasing the dog:

Transcript 6

In transcript 6, while the NI and the participants were in shock, the dog’s owner appeared behind them and caught it, telling them that it was not dangerous. Hence, although the dog’s sudden appearance undoubtedly shocked the NI, she could have noticed the presence of its owner chasing after him and would have immediately realized that the dog was not wild and was therefore harmless.

Accordingly, the NI directly quoted the dog’s “inner voice”: “He is saying, ‘You can’t catch me’ He is saying, ‘Let’s play more’” (line 8). Through this direct quotation of the dog’s inner voice as origo transposition, the dog and participants intersubjectively gained “personhood” with each other, thus deictically generating a transspecies engagement (Kohn 2014). The dog is voiced as a human-like creature, and humans emerge as an animal-like entity. In this sense, the NI and the participants deictically experience the selves as “not animal and not-not animal” (Willerslev 2004). It is noteworthy that the NI’s direct quotation, personification, or “intersemiotic translation” of the dog’s voice (Jakobson 1959), “You can’t catch me. Let’s play more” (tsukamaritaku nai-nda, motto asobu-nda), is uttered with the repetition of the euphonic form [‑nda](んだ) of the affirmative particle [‑noda](のだ), which serves as a diminutive, bringing forth the infantile and innocent character of the utterer—that is, like a human child or as yuru-kyara (ゆるキャラ), in contrast to the assertive and adult-like image invoked by [‑noda].²⁷ The deictic, improvisational, and intersubjective footing shift of the NI semiotically downshifts the huge and intimidating (bearlike) dog into a “cute” (kawaii 可愛い) and “loose” (yurui ゆるい) human child playing in the forest. Accordingly, the shocking contact with wildness is reconfigured as a pleasant, harmless, and harmonious experience during which humans can “dwell” (Ingold 2000) with animals, joyfully chasing each other as if playing hide-and-seek with an animal. It is infantilizing or, in a sense, “domesticating” the big wildness of nature through the small wildness of the infant child. Thus, the discourse framing—that is, both its textual genre type and register contextual features of this forest therapy—emerges and is “restored” as if the “lost” animistic relationship between animals and humans in the Anthropocene, or perhaps “interanimality” (Merleau-Ponty [1956–60] 1995, 247) was reconstructed; and the fearsome wildlife becomes personified and domesticated, as it were, from the perspective of human “owners” of animals as it was also implicitly indicated in the NI’s imperative utterance ❷ “Wait!” (transcript 5, line 1).

Through the deictic origo shift made by the NI’s direct quotation of the dog’s inner voice, the human-animal relational encounter is embodied for the NI and the participants. At the same time, such a deictically sharing of personhood with the animal using the affirmative particle’s euphonic form, ‑nda んだ, may characterize the encounter as an infantile and innocent, or possibly a fictional space-time, that is, Neverland.²⁸ In the following transcript, with such a romantic evocation of the iconism between humans and animals, the process of regenerating the animistic interactional framing, which might have been “collapsed” by the accidental contact with a dog rushing into it, is cooperatively finalized between the NI and the participants:

Transcript 7

In line 5, the NI again repeats the onomatopoeic word doron, doron to reflect the quality and shape of the heaviness of a large dog’s running movement. Emerging repeatedly, the onomatopoeic word, with its repetition as a type of poetic, self-focusing language use qua diminution with the use of euphonic form, certainly serves as a key sensuously perceivable object to rhematize an infantile character to this institutionalized nature-experience and human-animal encounter taking place in Imidas.

While the NI and participants were reflecting on the accidental encounter with the dog, the other emblematic one-liner—that is, possibly a master trope²⁹ of this enregistered, genred, and even institutionalized discourse of nature experience—was recited by Participant B in line 6: “This forest is perfect. Dogs also become happy, and humans also become happy” (kono mori ha saikou dane. inu mo yorokobe ba, ningen mo yorokobu この森は、最高だね。犬も喜べば、人間も喜ぶ。). As indicated below, this utterance shows explicit syntactic parallelism between lines a and b, contrastively positioning but iconically indexing the dog running along the trail with the humans walking in the forest, with both feeling “happy”:

As noted above in transcript 3, this type of parallelism (i.e., text-metrical structure) is recurrent in the forest therapy at Imidas. They mutually presuppose each other with the same lexicalized qualisigns, possibly serving as the crucial regimenting trope, conventionalizing and stabilizing the genred and enregistered interactions as forest therapy. While it was the NI’s statement in transcript 3, the utterances here are composed interactionally with the participants.

Let us also look at the aspect ‑u of this utterance in line b. If we examine the aspect ‑u of this utterance, we find that the last word of both lines, yorokob-u 喜ぶ (to become or feel happy), is used as the noncomplete or nonpast (i.e., present) tense, which also indicates the future tense. Considering that an animate noun human (ningen 人間) is used in the second line, which refers not only to the participants themselves but also to humans as a species, the noun dog (inu 犬) in line a also refers to both the huge dog they encountered in the forest and dogs as a species. Accordingly, the aspect ‑u of yorokob-u is not used as the future tense that dogs and humans will become happy, but instead operates as timeless present tense, which indexes laws, myths, and truths (see also Whorf [1939] 1956). In other words, this utterance rather operates as a performative statement, or “grammar, dry grammar” (Jakobson 1987), which manifests the immutable truth, establishing an (indexically) iconic relationship between the two communicative realms: (1) the de-temporal, mythical, nonhuman realm and (2) the occurring event of communication in the human realm (Silverstein 1993, 52). The series of these utterances nomically calibrate this interaction of the nature-experience in the forest as the faraway, immutable, and thus “fictional” space-time (see also Nakasiss 2020). Through such a nomic calibration, this forest before the NI and participants becomes the ritualized space-time instantiating that forest—an imagined totem pole of interanimality with harmless wildlife and pristine/preserved nature as “wilderness,” or perhaps Garden of Eden—beyond the modern human quotidian in the here and now.

At the end of this segment, Participant B’s utterance was reiterated by Participant F’s remark “humans become happy as well” (line 7), as if it marks the ritual completion of restoring the lost animistic linkage between humans and nonhumans in the Anthropocene. Hence, the forest therapy at Imidas appears to be a diagrammatically formalized, institutionally genred, and enregistered interaction through its rhematic language use as a sensuous route, realism—or (ontological) “turn”—for modern, Western, humanistic selves to (1) revisit the nonmodern, non-Western, nonhumanistic place of nature; (2) perceive the quality of nature and feel the presence of bodily senses; (3) encounter a voice of the voiceless entities and discover the lost animism with others; and (4) re-turn to everyday reality to reconfirm the location of their own roots. They get to know a range of qualities of the forest through this discursive passage, where such qualities arise qua a tone as tokened here and now—that is, qualia, which generate and are, in turn, stabilized by a particular conventionalized and institutionalized type of nature-experience organized around master tropes as the wilderness, animality, and nonhumanity, or the (lost) phaticity with nature, in postmodern, Western humanity. The participants experience and perceive its qualitative language use and communicative interaction as raw, sensuous, and unmediated with nature, thus as a quality “of” forests, through their bodily senses, which further equips them to apperceive, encounter, and specify the attributes of other perceivable things as an “immediate” sensuous truth. I call such a sense-focal process of communication qualia as facts of firstness. Its sensuous, naturalized, semiotically unmediated effects they experience are not only lexicalized qualities but rather lie as a broad potential space achieved through every representamenal unity of the quale.

Conclusion

Recognizing the recent ontological orientation to nonhuman entities in anthropological discussions, I refocused my analysis on language use and communicative interaction as the sign-process through which the interrelationality between culture and nature, or humans and nonhumans, emerges. Specifically, I analyzed a forest therapy session—where participants attended a lecture on the “scientifically/medically proven” efficacy of forest, entered the forest at night, and lay down on the ground—and demonstrated how the session shows a threefold structure with the use of the forest and bodily senses cumulatively enacting the material connection with nature through bodies as the phatic nexus. This experience of nature is composed of poetic, textual-metrical language use with ideophones and euphonic forms of Japanese, begetting itself as a diminutive object of the senses qua a “form,” and further equips the begetters of the language used in forest therapy to apperceive and discursively specify the attributes of other perceivable things thus as an “immediate” sensuous truth. I further analyzed one incident during a guided daytime walk through the forest in which the participants unexpectedly encountered a large animal rushing toward them. I examined how the deictic origo transposition with the NI’s direct reported speech of the dog’s (personified) inner voice allowed the discourse to create a transspecies space-time as voicing effects between humans and animals (i.e., a double voiced as the not animal, and the not-not animal) as the genre-register framing of the discourse emerges, is nomically reinstalled, and thus conventionalized and institutionalized through the parallelistic metanarration figurating the animistic but fictional relationality between humans, animals, and the natural environment.

The firsthand experience with nature is successfully achieved. However, it does not necessarily indicate that all participants perceive the same qualities of, or acquire the same “taste” to, nature in a way as instantiated through forest therapy. Somewhat ironically, one might even experience the “opposite” qualisigns—that is, arbitrariness, mediatedness, or unnaturalness of this naturalized figuration of interaction with nature through the deliberately enacted or “fictionalized” character of its language use and the genre-register schema. Such a sense of arbitrariness, mediatedness, and unnaturalness possibly resulted from a failed typification of tone thus as a secondarily attributed quality, may be even distinct, emblematic qualisigns—qua “fakeness” (Reyes 2021)—that might characterize postmodern environmentalism.³⁰

Our social world today is organized around various types of interaction and communication with environmental, natural, or nonhuman entities. Squarely comprehending that it is semiotically entextualized—as relationality between self and other, subject and object, culture and nature, or humans and nonhumans—only through such a semiotic occurrence of communicative interaction³¹ (Sedda 2022), assuming there is an environmental crisis caused by an unbalanced relationship between the natural environment and humans in the Anthropocene—which is undeniably the result of cultural communicative interaction—and language use is inevitably a part of, and perhaps the crucial element of, such a process, I articulate that the detailed analysis of language use and communicative interaction may be the locus of the ethnographic studies to investigate the natural-cultural process of apperception as facts of firstness through which specific interrelations and relationality between humans and nonhumans ontologically emerge. Through such analysis, however, it also seems vital to reflexively develop and possibly reconfigure the metalanguage, which makes such ethnographic analysis of language use and communication possible. Otherwise, the ethnographic studies of nonhuman entities can only operate as realism and thus continues to engage in the self-discovery ritual and self-reflexively generate “turns” in search of the real.