The Guitar and the Tree

Using the linkage between a tree species, Honduran mahogany, and its transformation into guitars and based on fieldwork in a Maya agro-forest community in Mexico, I propose and illustrate a framework based on debates on material culture and political ecology. I argue that the perspective called “enviromateriality” enhances environmental anthropology by shedding light on the complex chain of production and transformations of mahogany into guitars and how the perceived properties of the material are used to market them. This examination also sheds light on how forest communities, guitar builders, and players are entangled in a meshwork of power relations, mediated by the making and the playing of the electric guitar. The focus here is connecting cultural/geographical spheres to the often hidden and taken-for-granted global infrastructures and commodity chains that constitute cultural industries and cultural practices. Such research encourages us to question where musical cultures begin and end, to situate the mass production and consumption of guitars in relation to an increasingly complex global political ecology in the so-called Anthropocene.