Category: plants

Local language, local knowledge

Mulberries and lapsī are the topic today. It’s a real joy to work on the Flora of Nepal chapter on the Moraceae as so many of the species in its various genera are part of wonderfully complicated human-plant-animal knots. Figs, of course, are well known, but in the same family are mulberries, jackfruit, and all sort of other interesting plants.

The Himalayan mulberry (Morus serrata Roxb.) is not the same as the silkworm mulberry (Morus alba L) but it is a seasonal treat for those that know it. The word for mulberry  in Nepali is kimu. This doesn’t come from any Sanskrit, Persian or even Chinese word, as do many other terms in Nepali (think of gulāb for rose, or candān for sandalwood). It clearly comes from the Newari term kimbū or kimbūmā. Here the mā suffix is the bound final particle for larger woody plants and trees; it’s also the counting particle for trees.

Mike Hutt’s otherwise excellent Teach Yourself Nepali observes that relatively few terms in what we now call Nepali come from the languages of the local cultures that the Gorkha princes overwhelmed, but I suspect terms for local forest products may turn out to be an exception. In compiling a thesaurus of terms for plants and materia medica, I have encountered a few cases where it seems that the words for rather important plants entered Nepali (or Gorkhali) from Newari (or Nepāl Bhāṣā). The term for mulberry is one of these. The Persian term (tūt) for mulberry travels with the Mughal awareness of sericulture and becomes the word for mulberry in Hindi and Bengali. For whatever reason, Gorkhali speakers adopted the Newar word instead, calling it kimū. The mulberry isn’t widely remembered among Newars as a useful fruit now, but the terms kimba and kimise (-sī suffix: fruit) are attested in the 17th century and kimbū or kimbūmā are the words for mulberry.

So, too—and here I tread on somewhat more tenuous ground—the term in Nepali for Choerospondias axillaris, lapsī, would seem actually to be an old Newari term that has been replaced in Newari by a tadbhāva reflecting its medicinal and taste properties, āmlī. The modern Newari term clearly reflects both the sourness of  the fruit of C. axillaris and its position in Newar medicine analagous to the myrobalans. The Gorkhali term, however, looks like a Newar word and has no cognate anywhere: the ending in -si follows the usual construction of words for fruits. If I am right, then the word for this most Nepalese of fruits is actually an old Newari term, borrowed into Gorkhali, where the original Newari term has itself been replaced by a Sanskrit tadbhāva.

Other terms for culturally significant plants that may originally come from Newari include pharsī (gourd or squash, Cucurbita species — Newari phāsi) and kapāsī (maples, Acer spp). The ending -si is extremely common in Nepali and masks the existence of terms for fruiting plants ending in -si borrowed from Newari, but it also permits borrowings to exist in Nepali without appearing foreign. 

From this we may learn that, just as toponyms can reveal something of the history of a place, zoonyms may also be evidence for the dynamics of ecosocial contact.

cameoleopards

For a few years now I’ve signed myself off as an ‘ecosocial anthropologist’. It was the least annoying glue-together phrasing I could find for what I do, though other people refer to me (so far as I know, and without straying into all the perjoratives) as an anthropologist, Buddhologist or Himalayanist.

‘Ecosocial’, though, stinks as a phrase. First off, like ‘polyamory’, it mixes Greek ad Latin roots. ὄικος and socios should not be combined, and frankly, I should have known better.

As a concept, it belongs in the same bag as naturecultures, biocultural and a few other similar terms: the act of gluing together two sides of a dichotomy that neglects everything that was purposefully excluded when that dichotomy was crafted. As John Law points out in After Method, assemblages (and a dichotomy is an assemblage) not only divides the foreground from the background, it also relegates a vast realm of practices to be unmentionable and unthinkable. In Law’s terms:

…method assemblage makes something present by making absence. Formally I treat it as the enactment of presence, manifest absence, and absence as Otherness. More specifically it is the crafting, bundling or gathering of relations in three parts: (a) whatever is in-here or present (or instance a representation or an object); (b) whatever is absent but also manifest (it can be seen, is described, is manifestly relevant to presence); and (c) whatever is absent but Other because, while necessary to presence, it is also hidden, repressed or uninteresting. (Law 2004:144)

I am not particularly happy with ‘otherness’ as a description (have we no more precise term for deliberate ignorance?), but it will have to do; the point is clear. So what’s the problem with naturecultures and the rest of that ilk? Such terms actually preserve a form of human exclusivism that, one would hope, they are setting out to destroy. In particular, by accepting the terms of the natural/social dichotomy as given and seeking to bind them together into a whole, such terms solidify the forgetting of nonhuman actors in the generation of the social.

When, in Latour’s ‘Modern’—which dates back at least to Socrates, so far as I can tell—we divide the natural from the social, we accept a definition of person—all persons are humans—and society—society shapes and is made up from persons. This definition sits deep in the unexamined heart of social anthropology, and it explains why when one person treats their mother as a person, it needs no explanation; but when they treat their long-deceased ancestor, a raven, or a mountain as a person, then anthropology use be called in to explain their ‘beliefs’. So far as I can tell, though, that’s just as arbitrary a judgement as it is to declare that only religions which have ‘beliefs’ at their core count as real —or ‘world’—religions. It’s an exercise of power in defence of historical privilege.

Certainly most folk living in the central Himalayas assume that the animals, trees, landscape features, deities and all other such vivacious non-human actors all interact with each other, whether or not there are human persons around to witness or be affected by those encounters. Just which trees or mountains or what have you are taken to be important varies among different human social groups—but then again, I expect the crows and monkeys have fairly strong socially constructed and historically deep ideas about buildings, too.

What we need is a language for talking about studying the social networks and processes that happen among H. sapiens and others—and in particular, how those networks and processes contribute to cultural and biological diversities among all the overlapping social frames. Primate biocultural diversity; corvid biocultural diversity; fungal biocultural diversity? How do we talk about those kinds of richness, their documentation, their adaptation, their moral worth?

How do we move towards an activist anthropology of all beings?