Floraculture and the Sensorium: The Culture of Flowers . Jack Goody. ; Scents Appeal: The Silent Persuasion of Aromatic Encounters . Gabrielle J. Dorland.

Abstract

TACK GOODYS LATEST OFFERING, The Culture of Flowers, is a delight. A study of the symbolic import of flowers in different cultures, it commences, properly enough, with a conundrum: Why do Africans have so little interest in the culture of flowers, particularly as compared with Europeans and Asians, for whom flowers so importantly in commerce, symbolic representation and aesthetic sensibility? Goody's answer, developed in great detail in this large and wonderfully illustrated book, hinges on the double sense of that word culture. He reminds us that it can mean both that peculiar thing anthropologists are always trying to figure and the activities surrounding the cultivation of domestic plants and all the processes involved in their transformation from natural or wild plants into objects of use, desire, enjoyment, and prestation. Comparative floraculture, however, makes only part of his story, for he is also concerned with the representation of flowers as symbolic forms in a wide range of media, including the written texts that have configured both the culture of flowers and the cultures of flowers. We might put the question another way: Why do some peoples develop sensuous sensibilities for such non-utilitarian plants that, no matter how wondrously colorful and fragrant, are doomed too soon to fade and die? Goody first outlines the Near Eastern idea of the garden, with its associated meaning of paradise, and traces its diffusion and development in the ancient world as pleasure grounds, places of both retreat and ostentatious display for priests and kings. The spread of gardens to Greece and Rome secularized them and made them emblems of luxury for the wealthy. Flowers were also desacralized in discursive texts describing their properties and methods of cultivation. Flowers became objects of commerce in the form of garlands used as decorative offerings to deities or as crowns worn in celebrations and rituals. In time, garlands came to replace blood sacrifice and were offered as substitutes for animals. In Rome flowers ultimately came to be regarded with ambivalence, not just because they were luxury objects, but because their increasingly widespread cultivation took too much arable land out of food production and because their use in ritual as substitutes for blood came to symbolize the decay of manliness and martial spirit.