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The wedding of two trees: connections, equivalences, and subjunctivity in a Tamil ritual
Author(s) -
Venkatesan Soumhya
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.13550
Subject(s) - tamil , personhood , argument (complex analysis) , identity (music) , tree (set theory) , sociology , ideal (ethics) , epistemology , aesthetics , philosophy , biology , mathematics , linguistics , combinatorics , biochemistry
A wedding between two trees in a Tamil village reveals that a tree can be more than, while still remaining, a tree. It needs to be a tree because trees do certain things. It can be made more than a tree, however, through a logic of homological connections which temporarily create equivalences between trees and divinities. The wedding ( kalyanam ), a ubiquitous Tamil ritual form which pertains not only to marriage, creatively and subjunctively opens up new possibilities to change ‘it could be’ and ‘it should be’ to ‘let it be so’. The wedding of two trees seeks to materialize ideal situations and outcomes by mobilizing the aliveness of trees, a quality they share with humans and animals, without positing personhood, identity, or confusing categories. In making this argument, I question choices of comparators in anthropological analyses which posit a holistic ‘non‐West’ against a dualistic ‘West’ and contrast a taken‐for‐granted ‘us’ with ‘our’ really rather different ‘others’.