Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
    The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
    The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
    Audiobook12 hours

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

    Written by David Abram

    Narrated by Sean Runnette

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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 but with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patterns) 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 relationship 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 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. In 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 20, 2017
    ISBN9781541470965
    The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

    Related to The Spell of the Sensuous

    Related audiobooks

    Philosophy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Full Monty

      Mar 16, 2023

      If I knew I were to die in six months’ time, what would I do in the garden? Perhaps the notion of planting for a future I could not share would seem pointless. But I doubt it. Gardening transcends time. Gardens never exist in any one moment. They are

      3 min read

    • Article

      Sh0ring Up The Shore

      Aug 13, 2022

      This book is about the lives and abilities of the little-known, small creatures that can be found, if looked for, in the intertidal: the stretch of ocean shore between the high and low tide levels. This boundary between the two realms of our planet—l

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Age of the Entangled Self

      May 27, 2022

      The Age of the Entangled Self
      3 min read

    • Article

      Top 10 Books About Listening To Nature

      Jun 1, 2022

      Sound is a great connector among animals. A song or call links one creature to another almost instantaneously, like a telepathic signal that passes through dense vegetation and the darkest night. Sound also discloses the state of the non-animal world

      5 min read

    • Article

      What the Meadow Teaches Us

      Sep 16, 2020

      Anyone who believes that life is a battlefield full of individual warriors should go out into the meadows on a spring night. There, you can learn that the biosphere does not spawn cutoff, clearly differentiated individuals who compete against one ano

      6 min read

    • Article

      This Is No Way to Be Human

      Jan 15, 2022

      This Is No Way to Be Human
      10 min read

    • Article

      Our Most Effective Weapon Is Imagination

      Apr 28, 2021

      In his Theaetetus, Plato remarks to Socrates: “This pathos is proper to the philosopher: It is the thaumazein. And philosophy has no other point of departure than this.” The word, which contains the root thauma, the same that appears in thaumaturgy,

      9 min read

    • Article

      What the Meadow Teaches Us

      Sep 7, 2017

      Anyone who believes that life is a battlefield full of individual warriors should go out into the meadows on a spring night. There, you can learn that the biosphere does not spawn cutoff, clearly differentiated individuals who compete against one ano

      6 min read

    • Article

      Evaporative Losses

      Sep 15, 2020

      Breath travels. Our mouths are broken-open places—a house where only wind lives, searching the cupboards and closets. I replace your missing mouths with those of jars, mines, graves. What is gathered and dissipated by mouth? Once alternately filled a

      4 min read

    • Article

      Deep Ecology

      Aug 20, 2014

      Deep Ecology
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Whale Who Will Come Soon

      Sep 8, 2021

      The beachfront narrows to an ocherous ribbon, belted by blue, above and below. After a while, a handful of shearwaters appear in the air above the Cat Balou. The birds flash around us; like knife-thrower tricks at a circus. Diving through the water,

      8 min read

    • Article

      “Magic Is A Really Important Strand Of What It Means To Be Human”

      Jul 9, 2020

      Ellie Cawthorne: Your new book surveys a vast array of magical beliefs throughout human history. How do you define magic? Chris Gosden: My definition of magic is a human openness to the universe. And a universe’s openness to people. Let me give you

      9 min read

    • Article

      Bodies of Knowledge

      Aug 27, 2021

      Bodies of Knowledge
      19 min read

    • Article

      Itchy Feet-itis

      Jun 2, 2021

      Itchy Feet-itis
      9 min read

    • Article

      CONSCIOUSNESS v CATASTROPHE

      May 31, 2018

      CONSCIOUSNESS v CATASTROPHE
      5 min read

    • Article

      Why Light Inspires Ritual: For Aboriginal cultures, light is a physical and spiritual guide.

      Mar 27, 2014

      Some years ago, cultural anthropologist Veronica Strang was fishing on a trip to the Orinoco River in South America. When the fish didn’t bite, she settled for a walk along the riverbank. “The light filtering through the rainforest canopy threw a shi

      5 min read

    • Article

      Luminous Darkness: A Radical Path to Embracing the Unknown

      Aug 18, 2022

      Estimated reading time: 9 minutes — So many of us have been taught to fear the dark, the unknown, the unwanted, the unfamiliar. When the terrain we’re standing on feels unstable or wobbly, our conditioned tendency is to try to get back to seemingly

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Spell of the Sensuous

    4.5/5

    159 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      David Abram is an exquisitely poetic writer. This seminal book helps us become aware of the many things we are surrounded by and don’t even realize. It is a rememberance Spell among our many forgetfulness spells
    • 5/5
      Incredible.
    • 5/5
      The first 3 chapters were fantastic, especially chapter 2… the rest was good, though highly technical and a bit hard to stay engaged with.
    • 5/5
      Incredible.
    • 5/5
      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 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-bethBefore 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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.