Tree Leaf Talk

“What are the limits of relationship? What bounds the scope of imagination? Blending his ethnographic experience among the Foi of Papua New Guinea with his personal reading of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Weiner seeks the wellsprings of art and social life in the tension between revelation and concealment. In a world bedazzled by the glitz and speed of telecommunications, bathed in a phantasmagoria of ephemeral images, it is easy to think that reality can be whatever we choose to make of it. In the fashionable doctrine of social constructionism, anthropology has succumbed to this temptation. Tree Leaf Talk bursts the constructionist bubble. The book is a passionate appeal for a rigorously down-to-earth anthropology, rooted in the slow, pedestrian rhythms of day-to-day activity through which experience, history and meaning are sedimented in the land.” —Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen

“Freed from the descriptor, ‘A heideggerian Anthropology’, Tree leaf talk can then be read as a careful demonstration of the power of something like ‘an allegorical anthropology.” —University of Technology Sydney

“A powerful, dense and vital contribution to anthropology.” —Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute