The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

This is a book which will create a shift in how you see the world and stays with you once you finish reading it. David Abram beautifully weaves together philosophy, anthropology, & his personal observation to explore the deep connections between human beings, language, and the natural world in a poetic and accessible manner. He invites us to slow down and immerse themselves in the intricate relationships between their senses and their surroundings. Although this book isn’t light reading, read it in short bursts; its many ideas require reflection and help reawaken our sensory engagement with the earth and our understanding of our place in the world.

Wonderful effort by Abram connecting the many ways written language has allowed humanity to drift farther into abstraction at the expense of lived experience with the sensuous earth always below, above, and within us all.

Abrams tells the story of Earth--Gaia--as a living organism that speaks and breathes through us--and through all living things (and if we only listen, all things are living as they are part of Earth, the rhythm of all harmonizes into a breathing landscape). Abrams' work calls for a reawakening of nature, "who has lost [her] voice" (p. 138), a reawakening of our psyche that "lives the language of our lives more deeply" (p. 59). With the loss of nature, we have lost part of ourselves--we have abstracted ourselves from the environment, making the landscape irrelevant to our lives through the persistent valuing of technique and human over organic and alive. Through privileging human voices, we have forgotten to listen to the larger ecology, and have made our lives bare, commonplace. Wonder has been lost. Abrams' works invites ecological pedagogy--pedagogy attuned to the sounds and rhythms of the lifeworld. Ecological pedagogy might use myth to reveal the energy of the world (Campbell). Myth is not a search for the meaning of life, but an "interior road map of experience", a revelation of human experience. Myth is a "singing of the universe...[that] calls us to a deeper awareness of the living itself" (Campbell). Through the retelling of myths, through the dancing or reenactment of myths (as Abrams tells us village elders do for Dreamtime (p. 170)), we can re-enliven the stories in our own time, and give more possibilities for meaning to our experiences. Ritual might also be used in ecological pedagogy to guide us in re-enlivening the world. Rituals were performed before all important events in cultures with close ties to land--before hunting expeditions, before harvesting. We have forgotten that these matters hold meaning (i.e., we stop by Wendy's on our way home from work or school and don't give a second thought to where our food came from). Ritual is a way of offering homage to the earth, of showing appreciation and gratitude; but it is not only, or even primarily, for the earth, as Helen Payne (quoted in Abrams, p. 171) tells us is true for oral cultures. For the modern technological man, ritual would primarily reawaken the bond and awareness of the Other in nature, of animals and earth and sky. We have lost these words that "used to reverberate with meaning" (Van Mannen).

I'm really glad I read Abram's more recent book BECOMING ANIMAL before I read THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS. Why? Well, I found BECOMING ANIMAL to be a more elegant introduction to his ideas. The prose is really beautiful. BECOMING ANIMAL does not have lots of endnotes like SPELL does, which I guess is because SPELL is used as a supplemental text for ecology classes. Anyway, they are both very worthwhile reads if you're interested in getting outside of your Western mind for a while. First the good stuff about SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS: It's a great introduction to some major differences in how indigenous/oral-language people experience, interact with, and communicate with their world vs. how written-language people do, which, Abram says, basically happened after the Greek alphabet came into use, which was the first completely phonetic alphabet (no symbols left that involve imagery that ties the alphabetic letter to the tangible world). He uses great examples of Australian Aborigines, Inuit, and southwestern Native Americans to show how oral-language people communicate with their natural world, and not just with animals, but plants and rocks and rivers and really everything. He emphasizes the importance of place in the indigenous culture and how "story" is so completely and intimately integrated with geography that story can't even sensibly be understood apart from place. He talks a lot about Western linear time vs. the indigenous tendency toward cyclical time, and how oral-language people's life events are a continual re-creation of their world--a fascinating concept. There really is so much that's amazing about this book and it is clear that Abram has spent much of his life studying and researching these ideas, as he has lived with indigenous peoples and learned from shamans. He also weaves in the research of others very effectively. His analyses are filtered through his understanding of phenomenology--another really interesting aspect of the book. I would have given THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS five stars except for something Abram did toward the end, which I saw as a bit unfair. He creates a somewhat plausible argument based on the ancient Hebrew alphabet (no vowels) for why Judaism has been somewhat unfairly labeled anti-nature. I have no problem with this. But then he uses this as his departure point for laying at the feet of Christianity (its texts written in Greek) the real split between man and nature. Well, believe me, I'm no defender of Christianity (I'm agnostic) and I realize it has wreaked havoc with indigenous cultures and with nature. But, please! I have read the Old Testament and the New, and even though the Old Testament includes some very beautiful intertwining with nature--the pastoral scenes in Psalms, for example, and the Song of Solomon--it also has plenty of violence and destruction of nature by the Hebrews--especially from the time of Moses on. My real problem with what Abram does here is that his evidence is so one-legged and flimsy. Dr. Abram, why even bring this up if you're not willing to defend it better than you have here? Maybe you can write a whole book on this topic, and if you do I will gladly read it. But you've yet to convince me that Judaism is philosophically any more innocent than Christianity in its attitude toward nature!

This is one of the most scholarly treatments of the of human disconnect from Nature I have read. From early indigenous peoples to Socrates and beyond, Abrams takes us on a journey in time to find where the disconnect from Nature begins and spells it out not only in terms of the first "civilized" humans, but also how language began to sophisticate, yet distance itself and us from that part of Nature reality or "life-world" when we knew where our sustenance and life support came from and we had a more direct and reverent sensibility of it. Realizing the dynamics of the disconnection leads us back to the reconnection and is seen in many passages throughout this book such as: "SO THE RECUPERATION OF THE INCARNATE, SENSORIAL DIMENSION of experience brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporeally embedded. As we return to our senses, we gradually discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part of a vast, interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies- supported that is, not just by ourselves, but by icy streams tumbling down granitic slopes, by owl wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind." (p 65) "The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm." (p 95) "THE SENSE OF BEING IMMERSED IN A SENTIENT WORLD IS preserved in the oral stories and songs of indigenous peoples- in the belief that sensible phenomena are all alive and aware, in the assumption that all things have the capacity of speech. Language, for oral peoples, is not a human invention but a gift from the land itself." (p 262-3) This beautiful book is full of such passages and I keep it handy for continuous reference and enjoyment- it is one of the most marked-up and highlighted books in my possession. Thank you David Abrams!

I have long loved this book. I had occasion to recommend it again, and also have a moment to write a note about it... a rare synchronicity! So this: The few other reviews do a great job of describing the framework of relationship of the human to 'other-than-human' as exemplified in the evolution of increasingly complex abstractions of our communication systems, from pictograph to alphabet. From representation to communication by agreement that a symbol, and its related sounds mean a thing. What is passed over is the weaving of the story between the technical and the experienced. So I introduced the book thusly: It is an interesting book that weaves two stories together.. One of the experienced, "Other-Than-Human" world - of all types, from animal to insect, and charting the path of the human communication from the pictorial representation of the world as experienced, to the abstractions that make up the alphabet and the dictionary of words. Most of which have little direct association w the thing they are describing. In that movement of what might be called sophistication, he posits that our human experience has become increasingly split off from the rest of the world as our filter of engagement & experiences with the Other World(s) is increasingly via the cognitive & descriptive and less of the wordless, amazed, truly "awe-some" experience. I know I feel this lack. It is split that creates so many of the large and complex problems we are dealing with today. We tend to think we understand the systems we are sometimes rather slapdashedly mucking around with... We do not. What we do not typically reckon with is how integrated life is. And that it is more than a hallmark card, or a sappy new age chant to say that everything is connected to everything...Not knowing this is central to what we call "unintended consequences", but really are more accurately "unconscious consequences". While we have also gained some learning and benefit from our reductionist science, there is no doubt of that... if we do not heed the opening introduction of this book, and its basic prescription for our consideration : That to be human... a vital, life living , life supporting person/life force we Must have some meaningful relationship with the Other-Than-Human. For other books that work out that thesis in fact if not directly I'd suggest The Elephant Whisperer, and related books. And almost anything by Carl Safina. Especially "Song of the Blue Ocean".

It starts with the cover, open the door of this superb book, step through the beatific painting of a crane preening it's lavender feathers and you will enter into a world of discourse with all animate life. David Abram has cast a spell across the pages of my existence. His words are tattooed into the dermis of my spirit-skin, inked to a metamorphosis of my soul; his medium is the lettered-word. The animal-familiars he has birthed in this book have informed my flights of fancy, my hikes over the mountains and hillsides every day and dreamtime since. I am in love with his ability to transfer to the page with the tiny symbols we refer to as the alphabet a communication that reveals the true nature of our earthly evolution with all animate life. He is a writer, writing about writing, writing about the dawn of the written expression of words. Part travel memoir, the journey of a magician, his sleight -of-hand abilities to make a dove appear with ink on paper, will have you thinking and feeling about the manifestation of all reality. Lakota, Hopi, Hebrews circle the "winds of the four directions," as crows and fire-flies light the sky. Mr. Abram has created something sacred about the oral traditions of language and the development of the written word as it informs us and simultaneously separates us from all that is.

A breathtaking read. I learned (a lot), cried at times of our human ignorance/arrogance, and came away committed to attend to my place in the world that surrounds and enables me.

One of my favorite reads of all time. Profoundly insightful, historic, poetic... for expanding one's awareness about perception and how to listen and speak with the the more than human world

Sehr gute Analyse von der Beziehung des Menschen zur Natur.

A mind-expanding book on how we humans are ever connected to nature. At times the stuff shared flies over our head - especially the chapter on time, but on the whole a must-read book. And also a book to be reread often.

Very badly printed

This is an important, possibly vitally important work. It is eye-opening and thought-provoking. The author's main theme - the intimacy with nature experienced by preliterate societies and its loss in literate ones - is nigh impossible effectively to convey in words, especially the written word (as emphasised by the author), or even to oneself in thought, as the moment one tries to do so the matter abstracts itself from that which is experienced. The author makes valient efforts and the reader does get from this an intellectual understanding of his proposition. But he uses far too many words, repeats himself endlessly (and without much variety in expression). A book a third of the length would have been more elegant, more effective, better. In his postscript to this twentieth anniversary edition, the author seems a little too assured of the noteworthiness and literary merit of his work. But read my first sentence again, then read the book.