Publication
Imprint: New York : Vintage Books, 2017, c1996. Edition: Twentieth anniversary edition with a new afterword. Responsibility: David Abram. OCLC Number: 32819541. Physical: Text : 1 volume : xii, 336 pages ; 21 cm. Features: Includes afterword, bibliography, index.
Call number
Steward / Abram
ISBN
9780679776390
Original publication date
1996
Collections
CSS Library Notes
Description: A classic of ecological philosophy, The Spell of thee Sensuous continues to exert a powerful influence in many disciplines. At once lyrical, poetic, and intellectually bracing, this book startles our senses out of habitual ways of seeing and hearing, waking us ot our full-bodied engagement in the wider life of the animated Earth.
David Abram is a skilled sleight-of-hand magician who has lived among indigenous medicine persons on several continents. Starting from the intimate rapport between these traditional magicians and the animals, plants and landforms that surround them, The Spell of the Sensuous draws us into a remarkable series of investigations regarding the fluid, participatory nature of perception, and the reciprocity between our senses and the sensuous terrain. The book unfolds into an exploration of language, and the power of words either to enhance or to stifle the earthly life of the senses. -- from back cover
Table of Contents: The ecology of magic, a personal introduction to the inquiry --
Philosophy on the way to ecology, a technical introduction to the inquiry --
The flesh of language --
Animism and the alphabet --
In the landscape of language --
Time, space, and the eclipse of the earth --
The forgetting and remembering of the air --
Coda, turning inside out.
FY2019 /
David Abram is a skilled sleight-of-hand magician who has lived among indigenous medicine persons on several continents. Starting from the intimate rapport between these traditional magicians and the animals, plants and landforms that surround them, The Spell of the Sensuous draws us into a remarkable series of investigations regarding the fluid, participatory nature of perception, and the reciprocity between our senses and the sensuous terrain. The book unfolds into an exploration of language, and the power of words either to enhance or to stifle the earthly life of the senses. -- from back cover
Table of Contents: The ecology of magic, a personal introduction to the inquiry --
Philosophy on the way to ecology, a technical introduction to the inquiry --
The flesh of language --
Animism and the alphabet --
In the landscape of language --
Time, space, and the eclipse of the earth --
The forgetting and remembering of the air --
Coda, turning inside out.
FY2019 /
Physical description
xii, 336 p.; 21 cm
Media reviews
David Abram's much talked about, long-awaited, revolutionary book ponders the violent disconnection of the body from the natural world and what this means about how we live and die in it, in our work clothes, commuting, standing tall in the saddle, dead.
Village Voice
Speculative, learned, and always 'lucid and precise' as the eye of the vulture that confronted him once on a cliff ledge, Abram has one of those rare minds which, like the mind of a musician or a great mathematician, fuses dreaminess with smarts.
Description
Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception. For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate." How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.… (more)
Language
Original language
English
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User reviews
LibraryThing member willszal
At first glance, you might think that the is a book about philosophy. Abram does cover German philosopher Edmund Husserl and French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Both of these thinkers were "phenomenologists," focused on human perception and the study of sensory experience.
And yet this book is
The book covers the evolution and emergence of the written word:
*beginning with the first conventionalized pictographic system: Egyptian hieroglyphics, 3,000 BC, thousands of symbols directly representing the natural world,
*moving on to the first hybrid: Semitic aleph-beth, 1,500BC, 22 phonetic characters [no vowels], but with pictographic references
* and concluding with the first modern alphabet: Greek, 700BC, totally abstract characters, adapted from the aleph-beth
Before writing, it was place that held our memories and culture. Jews are archetypically nomadic, and it's no coincidence that they also happened to create the first written language describing human-made sounds as opposed to observable elements of nature. Their written word became their homeland.
The book goes on to highlight a series of breathtaking stories about the world views of indigenous peoples.
Did you know that the Western Apache of Arizona have a name for every place in their homeland, and that these places correspond with allegorical stories? In Apache, you can't tell a story without naming the physical location in which it took place.
Did you know that in Aboriginal Australia, women conceive their babies through the song of a specific place? Elders go back to the place when the mother first felt the presence of her child within, and listen to the song of that place. Once born, the baby is then responsible for the tending of that specific song line, and that specific place. When they die, they are again buried in the place in which they were conceived.
Abram then goes on to discuss theories of time and place. Or rather, he critiques those abstract concepts, and searches for a way to ground something like them in experience. His results: The future is withheld behind the horizon. The past is refused inside the ground. The present is held within the air, invisible and subconscious. In other words, time and space are inherently linked, and referring to them as separate dimensions can only confuse us.
This trend of wholeness and integrity recurs throughout Abram's narrative in an experience that he describes as synesthesia. Traditionally, this term refers to the overlapping of multiple senses. But what if the concept of five distinct senses is contrived to begin with?
The book both begins and ends with a grounding in the pain of both humanity and the earth experiences as a result of artificial separation due to our innovations with the written word:
“From an animistic perspective, the clearest source of all this distress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned violence needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet; only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former. While this may sound at first like a simple statement of faith, it makes eminent and obvious sense as soon as we acknowledge our thorough dependence upon the countless other organisms with whom we have evolved.” [Page 22]
“It was as though after the demise of the ancestral, pagan gods, Western civilization’s burnt offerings had become ever more constant, more extravagant, more acrid—as though we were petitioning some unknown and slumbering power, trying to stir some vast dragon, striving to invoke some unknown or long-forgetter power that, awakening, might call us back into relation with something other than ourselves and our own designs.” [Page 258-9]
Maybe as opposed to having it’s roots in agriculture or civilization, climate change is more closely tied to the thought patterns perpetrated by those who write and read?
Abram ends on a hopeful note, citing the emergence of a movement of people focused on “re-inbitation”—a return to a place-centric way of life. Such calls echo that of Martín Prechtel’s school of “re-indigenosity.” I myself am amongst this class of individuals bound and faithful to a place.
Not once does he touch on the irony of his medium: a book.
And yet this book is
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much more than that. If you can get past the biting critique of the written word [which many will take personally], then you can come to appreciate that Abram is suggesting nothing less than a deeply beautiful paradigm shift about how we relate to and experience the world.The book covers the evolution and emergence of the written word:
*beginning with the first conventionalized pictographic system: Egyptian hieroglyphics, 3,000 BC, thousands of symbols directly representing the natural world,
*moving on to the first hybrid: Semitic aleph-beth, 1,500BC, 22 phonetic characters [no vowels], but with pictographic references
* and concluding with the first modern alphabet: Greek, 700BC, totally abstract characters, adapted from the aleph-beth
Before writing, it was place that held our memories and culture. Jews are archetypically nomadic, and it's no coincidence that they also happened to create the first written language describing human-made sounds as opposed to observable elements of nature. Their written word became their homeland.
The book goes on to highlight a series of breathtaking stories about the world views of indigenous peoples.
Did you know that the Western Apache of Arizona have a name for every place in their homeland, and that these places correspond with allegorical stories? In Apache, you can't tell a story without naming the physical location in which it took place.
Did you know that in Aboriginal Australia, women conceive their babies through the song of a specific place? Elders go back to the place when the mother first felt the presence of her child within, and listen to the song of that place. Once born, the baby is then responsible for the tending of that specific song line, and that specific place. When they die, they are again buried in the place in which they were conceived.
Abram then goes on to discuss theories of time and place. Or rather, he critiques those abstract concepts, and searches for a way to ground something like them in experience. His results: The future is withheld behind the horizon. The past is refused inside the ground. The present is held within the air, invisible and subconscious. In other words, time and space are inherently linked, and referring to them as separate dimensions can only confuse us.
This trend of wholeness and integrity recurs throughout Abram's narrative in an experience that he describes as synesthesia. Traditionally, this term refers to the overlapping of multiple senses. But what if the concept of five distinct senses is contrived to begin with?
The book both begins and ends with a grounding in the pain of both humanity and the earth experiences as a result of artificial separation due to our innovations with the written word:
“From an animistic perspective, the clearest source of all this distress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned violence needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet; only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former. While this may sound at first like a simple statement of faith, it makes eminent and obvious sense as soon as we acknowledge our thorough dependence upon the countless other organisms with whom we have evolved.” [Page 22]
“It was as though after the demise of the ancestral, pagan gods, Western civilization’s burnt offerings had become ever more constant, more extravagant, more acrid—as though we were petitioning some unknown and slumbering power, trying to stir some vast dragon, striving to invoke some unknown or long-forgetter power that, awakening, might call us back into relation with something other than ourselves and our own designs.” [Page 258-9]
Maybe as opposed to having it’s roots in agriculture or civilization, climate change is more closely tied to the thought patterns perpetrated by those who write and read?
Abram ends on a hopeful note, citing the emergence of a movement of people focused on “re-inbitation”—a return to a place-centric way of life. Such calls echo that of Martín Prechtel’s school of “re-indigenosity.” I myself am amongst this class of individuals bound and faithful to a place.
Not once does he touch on the irony of his medium: a book.
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LibraryThing member pansociety
A dense but fascinating account of how we lost and can regain a close relationship with the natural world. Abram combines science and mysticism to rekindle an animistic dimension of perception and feeling without jettisoning rationality.
LibraryThing member sweetsapling
This book has become a touchstone for me since I read it: one of the most thought-provoking and life-changing books i've read. That said, it's been a while, so I don't want to try to write a detailed review at the moment, but the others currently here ring true to me.
LibraryThing member MattMackane
Incredible.