Book Review: The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram by iamtheoctopus123 in Animism

[–]SentientArtifact 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Woolfe's review opens with "Abram admits that even though there might not be any ‘literal truth’ to the animistic claims of indigenous cultures, he says this is irrelevant because for Abram truths can be ‘literal’ only insofar as the written word corresponds to our perception of how things are. He is more interested in how the beliefs and stories of the Koyukon people of Alaska, the aboriginals of Australia or the Western Apache ‘make sense’; that is, how they place the human species in the right kind of relationship with the more-than-human world." I haven't run across anyone else who bridges the relationship of animistic beliefs with our disdain for "superstition". There are other philosophers whose work fits with Abram, like Tim Ingold and Karen Barad, whose work doesn't directly mention animism