Haberman's focus is on worshippers' practice of affixing a metal facemask to the trees, to facilitate and deepen their relationship with them. He argues that this represents a form of "intentional anthropo-morphism," where human beings - knowing that we are wired to respond to faces - give human features to non-human persons. The darsan involved - a mutual seeing - doesn't mistake the tree for a human being but rather opens the human worshipper to a deeper communion with the god or goddess manifested in or as that tree. The obvious artifice of the facemask prevents it from being an unthinking effacement (sic!) of the tree's otherness - or so Haberman maintains.
The ideas are challenging and counterintuitive, and our windfall of class time gave us the opportunity to put them to the test. I invited students to draw facemasks, and to tape them briefly on our familiar courtyard trees, to see if this enabled a different kind of relationship with the trees. (Before proceeding I asked if anyone found the idea disrespectful of the trees or of the practices evoked; no-one did.)
The less anthropomorphic masks worked best for me, but all were interesting, and have got the students thinking in new ways about trees as persons. Thinking and sensing and relating? We'll have to see... and to ask the trees. (Top image from People Trees, 148)
