| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
SUGIOKA Tsukiko Baika Women's University, Faculty of Modern Human Studies, Professor, 現代人間学部, 教授 (20259401)
EGUCHI Kazuhisa National Museum of Ethnology, Professor emeritus, 名誉教授 (90045261)
ONO Yoshihiko Hokkaido University, Faculty of Literature, Professor, 文学部, 教授 (20126022)
NIKI Kazue Junsei Junior College, Faculty of Health, Lecturer, 保健科, 講師 (50269990)
SUGIOKA Nobuyuki The Eastern Institute, Research Member, 研究員 (80250033)
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| Research Abstract |
During these four years, we have visited several different countries, experiencing and watching different natural vegetations. And at the same occasion we have asked people living in each country to draw a tree and accumulated data of tree drawings. The countries we have visited include Cameroon in West Africa, Bali in Indonesia, Lijiang in China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Cluj-Napoca in Romania, Budapest in Hungary, Yaunde, capital city in Cameroon and Belfast in Northern Ireland. As for Belfast, we only observed the natural vegetation and could not get tree drawings because of our incomplete preparation.
Data of tree drawings we have accumulated are taken into the computer by Baum Viewer Software developed by Yoshihiko Ono and others. At the same time we have examined each drawing in terms of the style of apical termination, the ratio between the upper crown-like part of a tree and tree trunk, the style of bark expression, the placement of a tree, the size of a tree and the expression of
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the earth and roots. And then we have expressed them numerically and discussed the differences and characteristics of each country.
The word tree is naturally different among those countries because they use different languages. Therefore we needed to examine what kind of meaning the word "tree" in each country has. Then we have investigated the configurations of 9 word, such as tree, earth, water, fire, wind, sky, grass, human and woods, in a semantic space in each language.
We have come to conclude that tree drawings reflect the mentality of people living in each natural environment. For example, we found the "shoot expression" as one of the characteristics of tree images among the people living with palm trees. We considered this "shoot expression" was an expression of a world view that says the individual is part of the great flow of life, and that from the perspective of that great flow, the individual existence was merely a tiny part. Another example is appeared among tree drawing in Cameroon. Experiences of drawing a single line by Cameroonian people who had not experienced formal institutionalized education at the national level were considered to be different from those who had in other regions. It is considered to be our next task that we should re-vision the substantial meaning of drawing a single line as the expression on an image. Less
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