Bush and Tree at Once

Sep 8

The axe has a thin wooden handle; at the top, a small elongated steel head. It appears sleek in its form. Just like the movement by which it is used to prune. Just like the night transits into day. The sun has yet to rise, it is merely dawn and the sky features a most spectacular bluepurplepink hue. It will within a couple of hours be a clear blue sky and too hot to work the orchards. As of these morning hours though, the breeze is still fresh, the air still light, the day still emerging, work already ongoing. I watch the man closely as he grabs a set of sprouts growing at the base of the trunk and gently cuts them away from it. He repeats the act twice more, circulating the trunk, before he gathers the cut-off branches, walks them to a nearby pile, and continues to clear yet another trunk. The piles gathered in the orchard get added — poco a poco — as trunked structures (re)appear, one at a time.

It is my first time observing this practice, one that dates back to the cradle of olive cultivation, one by which olive plants through procedures of domestication — not to say histories of production — grow trained into the trunked–canopied shape of a tree through processes of cultural care (see IOC 2007 for written reference concerning use of emphasized vocabulary within the context of olive cultivation). I find myself thinking that I am so used to the trunked shape that it occurs the inherent growth habit of the plant to me. I am reminded about the first time I noticed an unpruned olive plant, and how I was struck by the wide and densely branched round appearance it grew into, void of human cultivation. I imagine the peculiar anatomies of olive plants encountered, especially those centennial and millennial in time. I feel curious to survey how sprouts grown part of the half-million registered natural monuments that the region presents as part of its patrimonial landscape. I contemplate all the times that I have noted and wondered about why practitioners reference to base-grown sprouts as wild olives. I understand now that they occur wild in their growth vis-à-vis the cultivated shape gained through the cultural care carried out by olive growers. Observing the man working his way around the olive plants, all these thoughts mingling in my head, I realize that, as routinely as the sprouts — called suckers in English, correspondingly polloni in Italian, since they within the context of olive cultivation occur as taking energy from the plant and thereby reduce its productivity — are removed, as routinely moves the man in the orchard performing this pruning act, and as routinely do olive plants materialize: as trees, as resources, as cultivated matter, as enactments, and as lastings of particular human-environment interactions.

Categorically speaking, the olive plant belongs to the bush family. Equally categorically speaking, it classifies as a tree. What constitutes the difference in categorization depends much on the context in which it is advanced. This as the plant takes different shape, both physically and conceptually, with reference to the place and practice of its occurrence. As mentioned above, the plant grows trunked through traditions of cultivation while wide void thereof; it grows tree in some respect, bush in others. Both bush and tree, both freely sprouted and culturally cared for, the plant categorically becomes correlationally to the practices, techniques, histories, infrastructures, value landscapes, modes and matters by which it is approached. By way of example, once in a while a sprout is preserved so to add to the continuous viability, let alone productivity, of a given plant. Culturally cared for, such sprout no longer occurs wild, but cultivated in kind; culturally cared for, the sprout grows part of the plant, part of production, and over time, part of the most peculiarly unified shapes of trunks that spreads throughout the landscape of Apulia.

And so, at once bush and tree, earthly rooted and humanly intervened — assemblaged in their configurations, equally well, social and material through space and time in their constitutions — olive plants emerge bounded of sorts. Hence, boundaries — bindings and bendings thereof, conceptual and physiological alike — represent a major interest engaging this research. A case in point exemplifying my curiosity in exploring the situated boundedness of boundaries relationally to the situated thinginess of things has herein been noted in my sharing of reflections on ways in which olive plants through practices of cultivation, domestication, and commodification categorically become as tree. This is though far from the only entry point by which categorical becoming ethnographically may be addressed within the context of olive cultivation and olive oil production. Far from it, for there are plentiful classifications, categorizations, and catalogues inherent to the becoming of the range of situationally bounded things — raw material, resource, scientific object, commodified product, food, cultural emblem, regional marker, patrimonial heritage, politicized matter — that olive plants, olives, and olive oils form. Naturally, some will occur more relevant than others to contextually reflect upon. Presumably, some will occur more natural than others for the given practitioner. Arguably, what constitutes the thing and what the thing constitutes occurs contextually bounded. And that, dear reader, that is one of the reasons for why it is such an anthropologically intriguing matter to think with. The bounded thing that is.