LIVING HISTORY Trees and Metaphors of Identity in an English Forest

This article is concerned with how trees constitute senses of place and identity in England. It focuses on how the experiential and situated aspects of everyday practice contribute to the case for treating trees as actants in social life rather than simply as a metaphoric resource. Material gathered at Hatfield Forest in Essex is used to examine how trees become entangled in the making of identity, and notions of time and place among wardens, volun-teers and visitors. Trees are found to be both latent containers waiting for the correct intervention and active producers of meaning that structure human responses. Key Words ◆ agency ◆ identity ◆ landscape ◆ material culture ◆ trees TREES AND METAPHORS OF LIFE Trees and their products are intimately woven into the material and social fabric of most societies. In some societies this weaving is tightly meshed, central to the daily realities of existence and fundamental in structuring language, identity, beliefs and rituals (Gell, 1995; Turner, 1967). In others the interweaving is looser, less marked, and further from the concerns of everyday life. In Britain, tree metaphors cluster around key symbolic expressions not unlike those found among non-western peoples (Rival, 1998). Trees are identified with humans, and admired for their great proportions, old age, potency and self-regenerating energy. While it is relatively straightforward to gather data that reinforce these metaphoric uses – escaping the ‘death ’ of work for the ‘life ’ and ‘balance