A Phenomenological Anthropology of Texts and Literacy

Abstract

About five years ago, I started gardening and developed it to the point that I now produce all the vegetables my family eats throughout the year. As I am writing this chapter, it is winter and I am supposed to prune several trees and bushes that we planted. Never having pruned before, my wife and I had bought a book entirely dedicated to pruning, containing many photos and diagrams of partially pruned pushes, where to cut and what to leave. Over the past several weeks, I had repeatedly taken up the book, tried to read and make sense of it, and subsequently laid it aside, completely frustrated by the fact that I did not know where to start cutting my own trees and bushes. Last week, we read that there was a free workshop on in a tree nursery and fruit farm. During the weekend, we attended it. The 25-year pruning veteran who ran the workshop started to talk and after 15 minutes, I turned around to my wife and said, “no better than the book.” But once he started pruning and talking about why he was cutting the branch he was about to cut, and why he was leaving another one nearby, and when he pointed to a pruned tree that he wanted his tree to look like, things became better. As he went on, I started predicting which branches he would cut. Taking his actual cutting or not cutting as feedback, my predictions became increasingly better. Two hours later, I returned home and began pruning a few bushes and small trees. Inside, I took another look at the book and now, everything was clear. I realized that the book was telling me exactly what I had to do, and it did so in a very clear way.