Spirited trees – negotiating secular, religious and traditionalist frameworks

The question of human–animal relations doesn’t exclude vegetal life – for when the blurring of boundaries of the animal and the spirited is underway, it will tend to move beyond those beings that biology fenced in as ‘animals’ too. This chapter will focus on different ways to understand trees, where religious, conservationist and cultural discourses overlap in West African contexts. Digging through the theological interpretations of trees by the monotheist religions that dominate the region (Christianity and Islam), and confronting them with traditionalist as well as modern secular approaches to nature, this chapter gives another example of how the environment can and has to be negotiated.