“The Tree with a Thousand Faces” started out as the title of an interlude in my thesis, one that allowed me to branch out from eucalyptus in Portugal to the genus’ more global, and globe-trotting history as one of the foremost tree plantation species of the last 250 years or so.
The title drew inspiration from Joseph Campbell’s famous 1949 book ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’. The book was an exercise in comparative mythology, wherein Campbell distills the myriad mythological stories of societies the world over into a grand and universal ‘monomyth’. Campbell’s claim to have found the ultimate ‘monomyth’ which can explain away the myriad diversity of human cultural and religious life was typical of his time, but today sits rather awkwardly in the philosophical space opened up by postmodernism and other schools of thought which look on at claims for universality with a heavy dose of suspicion.
For all the title’s anachronism, there was something about the way it posed a singular, universal figure against the multiplicity of its cultural expression that felt ripe for its own figuration. that rather apt in itself figuring some of the themes which continue to preoccupy environmental anthropology and other kindred disciplines.
To be continued…
The Tree with a Thousand Faces 