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4.06 AVERAGE
4.06 AVERAGE
I am very sympathetic to the book's thesis, but I found myself frustrated by the wishy-washy stream of consciousness, and it gets steadily worse as the book progresses. It's more armchair philosophy than ecology, mixed with Abram's apparently furvent wish to entertain and awe an audience. Yes, rocks are part of living systems, where one wants to differentiate between living and nonliving. No, I don't think the notion of the individual arose with Copernicus and Spinoza doesn't do anything for me either. Also, being a street magician makes the author every bit as much an ecologist as it does an honorary native medicine man or shaman.
I thought the book would be about the role of humans as animals in our ecosystems, but it seems the title was instead a reference to the author's attempts to physically become a crow by magic he claims to have learned from a Himilayan shaman. By the conclusion, as Abram claims he is stealing a story "once heard in various forms among place-based peoples," we are sinply grateful for the end. But, on this note, assuming this story isn't completely made up, I don't know how he missed the memo that stealing native stories for personal profit is not cool.
One star for some thoughts I happen to agree with. A generous second star for some campfire stories, but "Magical Me" by the fictional character, Gilderoy Lockhart, comes to mind. Or, as Abram describes himself, a conjurer. As others have said in their ratings, it seems like his first book was a surprise success, and he had to write a sequel fast to make a living. Maybe in the third book, he'll be casting love spells on dragons. I have to give him props for having the guts to write a book (twice), but I think most of it is invented or plagiarized or reworked from both shaky academia and native cultures, real and imagined.
I get the sense the author subscribes to the Rudolph Steiner philosophy of intuiting divine truth by believing you already know it and just have to unlock it. If you've ever seen Steiner's "agriculture" book -- basically kindergarten-level doodles supposed to represent imagined cosmic forces, as he had no practical or academic experience with farming -- you may realize this method of knowing leaves something to be desired.
It results in some basic misunderstandings. I'll humor Abram here and give him the benefit of the doubt that he is genuinely interested in animal communication and didn't just write this second book to keep the crowd adoring him. To begin, just because we can communicate between species doesn't mean that communication happens according to human terms, senses, or expectations. Abram may have "borrowed" the idea of talking to other species from one or another culture indigenous to North America (without credit, as is his tendancy), but lacking more than a superficial grounding in those cultures and relying on his geniune belief that he is magical, he badly misrepresents the idea. Assuming a whale, tree, or rock understands the intentions of a calmly vocalizing human robs the others of their agency, ignores their non-human senses and perspectives, and is generally misleading. After all, humans in the same culture and even family often fail to communicate their intended messages. Gently humming to a pit viper may still get you killed.
A telling instance of this anthropocentric world view is Abram's sea lion story. Contrary to the author's fears, sea lions don't eat people. According to his story, he was foolishly (and perhaps without realizing it) boating right over a whale bubble net. The sea lions came to join the feast, and he thought the only way to ward off the attack of all these sea lions, stirred up by their sea-god-whale and swimming his way, was to wave his arms in the air because he had once sung to a moose and happened not to have been mauled.
Everyone has their own worldview, shaped by their lived experiences, but if he were to, say, observe sea lions for years, familiarize himself with them as individuals, and learn more about them on their own terms, he may have a much more interesting story to tell, such as the stories told by Rick McIntyre about the wolves in Yellowstone or Jane Goodall about the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park.
Far from intuiting through the senses, there is also a lot of language in the book that doesn't quite cite sources, but which is, in fact, based on academic or quasi-academic thought.
In chapters 8 and 12, and again in the conclusion, he espouses the view that the alphabet changed everything, separated humans from our ecosystem, and led to monotheism. I was intrigued, so I went online. He should have said this is one idea, called the Alphabet Effect, written as a testament to modernism. It has disjointed arguments, and it's really more a work of pseudo-psychology, written by a physicist and an English teacher, self-styled as a media ecologist. That would have been honest, and it honestly would have been more interesting, too.
He also could have said it is far from a unanimously held view. He might even have gone so far as to have added that its authors McLuhan and Logan (1977) have been criticized for offering little more than catchy phrases, showmanship, convoluted explanations, and -- in my view, at least -- more than a pinch of ethnocentricm. Abram has updated the showmanship, providing his ideologically-sympathetic readers justification in anamistic and ecological rather than ethnocentric terms, but the logic is every bit as fluffy. In fact, he returns to this point so often, it seems he hasn't decided yet whether to write a book about it or about how magical a magician he is.
There was also a point early on where the author got so far inside "Vincent van Ghhhh's" head that he came out where the sun don't shine, presuming a close intimacy and knowledge of the painter's subconscious thoughts and recruiting his ghost to the author's cause.
Also, I think he may have profoundly misunderstood his physics teacher, but, having moved to biology, it is a fascinating topic, too. He should have stuck with biology instead of becoming a peregrinating magician-cum-cultural-ecologist. Biology could use more people who think in terms of systems, enjoy cross-disciplinary work, and have an active imagination. It's a loss to the study that he got turned off of the field and instead carved out a new silo.
I recognize it's easy to feel modern animal behavior is soul-crushing with the historic insistance in this culture on the separation of humans from nature, the promotion of the former to a diety, the demotion of the latter to savagery (the word coming from the Old French, sauvage, or wild and untamed), and the trend of looking at non-human animals as automatons. However, the field has benefitted from some well-researched dissenters, and it would benefit from more.
On the other hand, it was Abram's decision ultimately not to suspend his inner rebel a few more years and genuinely build some foundations in the science he wished to critique. He isn't the first author who, having abandoned any remotely reproduceable scientific study, also abandons citations, and is forced to make a living on the periphery of science with good crowd work and slight of hand. Fortunately for him, his efforts have rewarded him with a stable career. But his work would benefit at least from citations -- acknowledgements that the ideas had their influences from others.
Another thing that grates in this book is the subtle claim to have inherited ancient wisdom from "traditional" or "non-modern" people. All people are modern people, regardless of lifestyle, whether in "hunter-gatherer" or in "supermarket" cultures. Having read a number of authors living in some of the cultures viewed by ours as "traditional," I took home the message that it's usually a lie to claim to be the "chosen white guy" to whom a sacred knowledge practitioner has entrusted some ancient wisdom.
Abram has no qualms about such stories. He claims the unique ability to sense particularly powerful "magicians" or "sorcerers," and he wants the readers to believe his magic tricks make him especially powerfully magical in a sort of spiritual way.
Chapter 11 is just bonkers. Sure, buddy. As a street magician, you're practically an honorary native medicine man. Geesh. If he was surprised that his Himilayan guide regretted introducing him to a local medicine man, he has only to look for reasons in stories like Maria Sabina's, which illustrate the risks of introducing outsiders looking for ancient wisdom to community spiritual leaders.
I'm sure his stories go over well with the ladies at a dinner party, so maybe I'm just not his target audience. David Abram portrays himself as an almost desperate, bleeding-heart romantic. Read it high or in the woods or both. Also, be a better human. Interact in your ecosystem. Bake a giant puffball lasagna.
If you like magic tricks, embellished stories, cultural appropriation, and flowery sentences sprinkled with pseudo-science, you'll love this book. If you are sympathetic with the book's thesis, and especially if you are turned off by reading books from actual researchers, you might really enjoy this book. If you want to relive fond memories of common-room chats with fellow backpackers in their twenties, you might enjoy this book. If you've never bunked in a youth hostel and you have a migratory spirit, you might enjoy this rambling book. There are a couple of well-told travel adventures in this book and more than enough embellished imagery.
If you want to read better books on the more-than-human world, read Beyond Words by Carl Safina, Immense World by Ed Yong or Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. If you want to read anamistic cultural worldviews, go straight to authors from those cultures. Some I've enjoyed are God is Red by Vine Deloria Jr, Of Water and Spirit by Malidoma Patrice Somé, and Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta.
I thought the book would be about the role of humans as animals in our ecosystems, but it seems the title was instead a reference to the author's attempts to physically become a crow by magic he claims to have learned from a Himilayan shaman. By the conclusion, as Abram claims he is stealing a story "once heard in various forms among place-based peoples," we are sinply grateful for the end. But, on this note, assuming this story isn't completely made up, I don't know how he missed the memo that stealing native stories for personal profit is not cool.
One star for some thoughts I happen to agree with. A generous second star for some campfire stories, but "Magical Me" by the fictional character, Gilderoy Lockhart, comes to mind. Or, as Abram describes himself, a conjurer. As others have said in their ratings, it seems like his first book was a surprise success, and he had to write a sequel fast to make a living. Maybe in the third book, he'll be casting love spells on dragons. I have to give him props for having the guts to write a book (twice), but I think most of it is invented or plagiarized or reworked from both shaky academia and native cultures, real and imagined.
I get the sense the author subscribes to the Rudolph Steiner philosophy of intuiting divine truth by believing you already know it and just have to unlock it. If you've ever seen Steiner's "agriculture" book -- basically kindergarten-level doodles supposed to represent imagined cosmic forces, as he had no practical or academic experience with farming -- you may realize this method of knowing leaves something to be desired.
It results in some basic misunderstandings. I'll humor Abram here and give him the benefit of the doubt that he is genuinely interested in animal communication and didn't just write this second book to keep the crowd adoring him. To begin, just because we can communicate between species doesn't mean that communication happens according to human terms, senses, or expectations. Abram may have "borrowed" the idea of talking to other species from one or another culture indigenous to North America (without credit, as is his tendancy), but lacking more than a superficial grounding in those cultures and relying on his geniune belief that he is magical, he badly misrepresents the idea. Assuming a whale, tree, or rock understands the intentions of a calmly vocalizing human robs the others of their agency, ignores their non-human senses and perspectives, and is generally misleading. After all, humans in the same culture and even family often fail to communicate their intended messages. Gently humming to a pit viper may still get you killed.
A telling instance of this anthropocentric world view is Abram's sea lion story. Contrary to the author's fears, sea lions don't eat people. According to his story, he was foolishly (and perhaps without realizing it) boating right over a whale bubble net. The sea lions came to join the feast, and he thought the only way to ward off the attack of all these sea lions, stirred up by their sea-god-whale and swimming his way, was to wave his arms in the air because he had once sung to a moose and happened not to have been mauled.
Everyone has their own worldview, shaped by their lived experiences, but if he were to, say, observe sea lions for years, familiarize himself with them as individuals, and learn more about them on their own terms, he may have a much more interesting story to tell, such as the stories told by Rick McIntyre about the wolves in Yellowstone or Jane Goodall about the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park.
Far from intuiting through the senses, there is also a lot of language in the book that doesn't quite cite sources, but which is, in fact, based on academic or quasi-academic thought.
In chapters 8 and 12, and again in the conclusion, he espouses the view that the alphabet changed everything, separated humans from our ecosystem, and led to monotheism. I was intrigued, so I went online. He should have said this is one idea, called the Alphabet Effect, written as a testament to modernism. It has disjointed arguments, and it's really more a work of pseudo-psychology, written by a physicist and an English teacher, self-styled as a media ecologist. That would have been honest, and it honestly would have been more interesting, too.
He also could have said it is far from a unanimously held view. He might even have gone so far as to have added that its authors McLuhan and Logan (1977) have been criticized for offering little more than catchy phrases, showmanship, convoluted explanations, and -- in my view, at least -- more than a pinch of ethnocentricm. Abram has updated the showmanship, providing his ideologically-sympathetic readers justification in anamistic and ecological rather than ethnocentric terms, but the logic is every bit as fluffy. In fact, he returns to this point so often, it seems he hasn't decided yet whether to write a book about it or about how magical a magician he is.
There was also a point early on where the author got so far inside "Vincent van Ghhhh's" head that he came out where the sun don't shine, presuming a close intimacy and knowledge of the painter's subconscious thoughts and recruiting his ghost to the author's cause.
Also, I think he may have profoundly misunderstood his physics teacher, but, having moved to biology, it is a fascinating topic, too. He should have stuck with biology instead of becoming a peregrinating magician-cum-cultural-ecologist. Biology could use more people who think in terms of systems, enjoy cross-disciplinary work, and have an active imagination. It's a loss to the study that he got turned off of the field and instead carved out a new silo.
I recognize it's easy to feel modern animal behavior is soul-crushing with the historic insistance in this culture on the separation of humans from nature, the promotion of the former to a diety, the demotion of the latter to savagery (the word coming from the Old French, sauvage, or wild and untamed), and the trend of looking at non-human animals as automatons. However, the field has benefitted from some well-researched dissenters, and it would benefit from more.
On the other hand, it was Abram's decision ultimately not to suspend his inner rebel a few more years and genuinely build some foundations in the science he wished to critique. He isn't the first author who, having abandoned any remotely reproduceable scientific study, also abandons citations, and is forced to make a living on the periphery of science with good crowd work and slight of hand. Fortunately for him, his efforts have rewarded him with a stable career. But his work would benefit at least from citations -- acknowledgements that the ideas had their influences from others.
Another thing that grates in this book is the subtle claim to have inherited ancient wisdom from "traditional" or "non-modern" people. All people are modern people, regardless of lifestyle, whether in "hunter-gatherer" or in "supermarket" cultures. Having read a number of authors living in some of the cultures viewed by ours as "traditional," I took home the message that it's usually a lie to claim to be the "chosen white guy" to whom a sacred knowledge practitioner has entrusted some ancient wisdom.
Abram has no qualms about such stories. He claims the unique ability to sense particularly powerful "magicians" or "sorcerers," and he wants the readers to believe his magic tricks make him especially powerfully magical in a sort of spiritual way.
Chapter 11 is just bonkers. Sure, buddy. As a street magician, you're practically an honorary native medicine man. Geesh. If he was surprised that his Himilayan guide regretted introducing him to a local medicine man, he has only to look for reasons in stories like Maria Sabina's, which illustrate the risks of introducing outsiders looking for ancient wisdom to community spiritual leaders.
I'm sure his stories go over well with the ladies at a dinner party, so maybe I'm just not his target audience. David Abram portrays himself as an almost desperate, bleeding-heart romantic. Read it high or in the woods or both. Also, be a better human. Interact in your ecosystem. Bake a giant puffball lasagna.
If you like magic tricks, embellished stories, cultural appropriation, and flowery sentences sprinkled with pseudo-science, you'll love this book. If you are sympathetic with the book's thesis, and especially if you are turned off by reading books from actual researchers, you might really enjoy this book. If you want to relive fond memories of common-room chats with fellow backpackers in their twenties, you might enjoy this book. If you've never bunked in a youth hostel and you have a migratory spirit, you might enjoy this rambling book. There are a couple of well-told travel adventures in this book and more than enough embellished imagery.
If you want to read better books on the more-than-human world, read Beyond Words by Carl Safina, Immense World by Ed Yong or Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. If you want to read anamistic cultural worldviews, go straight to authors from those cultures. Some I've enjoyed are God is Red by Vine Deloria Jr, Of Water and Spirit by Malidoma Patrice Somé, and Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta.
A few hundred pages of above average poetic language and occasional philosophical arguments to help the reader reframe reality: the world is not a remote lifeless place that we understand through mental abstractions, but a living thing in which we participate through sense experience.
If you want to learn this, but you struggle with it, you might have to read the whole book. I've read other books with the same idea, like Abram's [b:The Spell of the Sensuous|48582|The Spell of the Sensuous Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World|David Abram|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403170494s/48582.jpg|915422], and Morris Berman's [b:The Reenchantment of the World|486977|The Reenchantment of the World|Morris Berman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347699438s/486977.jpg|475257] and [b:Coming to Our Senses|56982|Coming to Our Senses Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West|Morris Berman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1266461509s/56982.jpg|55510], so I got the idea after a few chapters and skimmed the rest.
The nice thing about this book is that the long descriptions of sense experience might inspire you to actually practice seeing the world differently.
If you want to learn this, but you struggle with it, you might have to read the whole book. I've read other books with the same idea, like Abram's [b:The Spell of the Sensuous|48582|The Spell of the Sensuous Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World|David Abram|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403170494s/48582.jpg|915422], and Morris Berman's [b:The Reenchantment of the World|486977|The Reenchantment of the World|Morris Berman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347699438s/486977.jpg|475257] and [b:Coming to Our Senses|56982|Coming to Our Senses Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West|Morris Berman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1266461509s/56982.jpg|55510], so I got the idea after a few chapters and skimmed the rest.
The nice thing about this book is that the long descriptions of sense experience might inspire you to actually practice seeing the world differently.
Beautifully written. Does not need to be listened to in order of chapters. I agree with many ideas in this book, but the preachy way the author thinks himself so much above us silly mortals was annoying.
A beautiful companion for these dark days of crisis on all sides. Beautiful, too, in audiobook form, for long meandering walks at summer’s end.
At first it was quite hard for me to get into this book. I felt a bit lost among David Abram's very expressive language whilst he was trying to explain NATURE on paper (not a very easy task for anyone). But slowly my mind tuned into the rhythm of his storytelling and I started to pick up up important points and ideas.
This book talks about 'unnoticeable' things in surrounding landscapes and human nature that everybody take for granted. However these 'unnoticeable' things are actually what makes us animals and humans - thus they are extremely important. it is a real pleasure to read things you've always been thinking, but never even thought it is worth mentioning them out loud.
Abram shares his personal experiences with the readers and it seems like this book is quite a personal one. I definitely recommend reading it!
This book talks about 'unnoticeable' things in surrounding landscapes and human nature that everybody take for granted. However these 'unnoticeable' things are actually what makes us animals and humans - thus they are extremely important. it is a real pleasure to read things you've always been thinking, but never even thought it is worth mentioning them out loud.
Abram shares his personal experiences with the readers and it seems like this book is quite a personal one. I definitely recommend reading it!
Good fucking God this is one of the best books on the planet. Read it and luxuriate in the subatomic textures of the natural world.
Despite all our giddy technological dreams, this vast and inscrutable land— drenched by the rains and parched by the summer sun —remains the ultimate ground, and the final horizon, of all our science. It is not primarily a set of mechanisms waiting to be figured out, this breathing land. It is not a stock of resources waiting to be utilized by us, or a storehouse of raw materials waiting to be developed. It is not an object. Abram 80
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced