ABSTRACT
LUMBERING (or logging) refers to the harvesting of trees for the manufacture of lumber or woodrelated products such as paper, conducted either commercially for profit or for subsistence use. Associated with the methods of lumbering are occupational traditions, practiced by regionally delimited communities of woods workers and their families. These traditions include specific skills, techniques, ritual customs, verbal lore, and material artifacts that function both as means for workers to perform their jobs and as expressions of occupational identity. Lumbering has long been a dangerous and much-romanticized activity, symbolized in the iconic status of Paul Bunyan, a fictive American folk hero who has been more popular with the general public than with actual communities of timber workers. For loggers, or lumberjacks, the most meaningful aspects of their heritage remain their close solidarity as an occupational group and their intimate connections to the natural world.
