Engaging the Nature through Naming

Note: This piece discusses an interesting and excellent doctoral thesis by Tyler Denmead, who has had a long career in arts and policies before his research on community artists at Cambridge. He is now a Lecturer of Arts and Creativity Education there. His thesis “Beautiful little moments: a principally ethnographic study of eight East Anglian artists’ pedagogies” can be assessed here.

When you are leading an activity in nature, is it more important for the participants to be able to recognize things or to be engaging them?

I once went on a beautiful group-hike guided by a forest research scientist turned eco-spirituality practitioner. The hike was a discovery of nature and of my relationship with it. I was especially fascinated with her description of the connections among the plants, seeds, insects, seasons, birds….well you get the idea.

Since then, I have always thought about activities in nature to be about understanding how it works and to work with it.

Yet the observations by Denmead in his research gave me a deeper perspective. Instead of community artists explaining to participants the names of things they encountered in nature, the artists he researched encouraged people to invent their own names.

There were a variety of examples of inventing language I observed and heard during workshops. At Powell Cemetery, a child invented the work “nutkin” to describe a catkin, and a girl named a “snow machine tree” as her mother noted moving beyond the fear that her daughter should not be allowed to shake the flower blossoms from it. Along similar lines, Lucy used playful alliteration when she offered a boy “chalky chalk” at Blackberry Bush. (Denmead, 272).

Before reading his thesis, my first instinct in these situations would be to offer to the participants the ‘correct’ names of these things in nature. But Denmead explained that

I interpreted the significance of the invention of language to the artists as evidence that participants were engaging with the unfamiliar. New words reflected to the artists an extended and previously unknown way of engaging with the world, and indeed, the creation of new words themselves is an unfamiliar experience.

I had a bit of an epiphany after reading this interpretation. Whether it is in nature or in everyday play, this sort of inventing language by children or anyone not familiar with the ‘correct’ name should not first be considered ignorant, at least not to the community artist and socially-engaged artists. The occurrence of such language invention should ring a bell in the minds of the practitioners, that these people are engaging something and making sense of a new experience.

On the other hand, to be able to call something by its given name may simply be recognition, an act that can be quite passive. Denmead’s interpretation of the value of inventing names is resonated in Dewey’s discussion in Art as Experience. Dewey pointed out that recognition is functional and only touches the “shell about objects”, whereas perception is a state where a person is actually engaged. Moreover, it is easy for recognition to cut short perception because people are prone to cease their engagement once they feel that something is adequately handled, such as the time when I have recognized and remembered the name of a tree.

But of course, knowing the ‘actual’ name of trees, birds or leaves connect us to the deep tradition and care for nature.

Practically speaking, there are two things to work on to bring about this environment of inventiveness:

• First, to suspend participants’ urge for information and resolution, so that they engage with the earth in other ways that open instead of close possibility.
• At some point in the session or series of sessions, translate the invented language into something deeper than simple words. This way, when information or ‘actual’ names are found, the invented language does not become obsolete, but instead adds to the fuller experience of the participant.