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Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, by David Abram
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Review
“A wild book in every sense of the word, full of stories that will leave you trembling, but even fuller of ideas that will send you out into the world with new eyes.” —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth “This book is like a prehistoric cave. If you have the nerve to enter it and you get used to the dark, you’ll discover things about storytelling which are startling, urgent and deeply true. Things each of us once knew, but forgot when we were born into the 19th and 20th centuries. Extraordinary rediscoveries!” —John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and Why Look at Animals “I cannot imagine another book that so gently and so persuasively alters how we look at ourselves.” —Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle “One of the most compelling and important ecology books in decades.” —Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace International “A truly alchemical book. . . . Those of us who still hope for a revolutionary change in our thinking toward animals, the living land and the climate will welcome this book. Abram is an audacious thinker, a true visionary, and, really, just a damn good nature writer.” —San Francisco Book Review “An intricately textured, deep breath of a book that blurs the boundaries between human and animal, mind and earth. Prose as lush as a moss-draped rain forest and as luminous as a high desert night. . . Deeply resonant with indigenous ways of knowing, Abram lets us listen in on wordless conversations with ancient boulders, walruses,birds, and roof beams. His profound recognition of intelligences other than our own enables us to enter into reciprocal symbioses that can, in turn, sustain the world. Becoming Animal illuminates a way forward in restoring relationship with the earth, led by our vibrant animal bodies to re-inhabit the glittering world." —Orion “A stunning, compelling journey into embodied, earthly intelligence, Becoming Animal is philosophy at its engaging best. Prepare for a wild, profound ride into the essence of the human animal—an essence embedded in communion with the Earth. A must read for anyone concerned about the future of the planet and ourselves.” —Kierán Suckling, co-founder and Executive Director, Center for Biological Diversity “In Becoming Animal, David Abram has crafted the rarest of literary gems: a sublime effort combining transcendent prose, lucid insight, and lasting consequence.” —Shambhala Sun “If we are to survive—indeed, if we are to stop the dominant culture from killing the planet—it will be in great measure because of brave and brilliant beings like David Abram. This is a beautifully written, deeply moving, and important book.” —Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older Than Words and Endgame Becoming Animal brings us home to ourselves as living organs of this wild planet. Its teachings leap off the page and translate immediately into lived experience. —Joanna Macy, Buddhist scholar and activist “Without doubt one of America’s greatest nature writers, one who ably follows in the footsteps of Muir, Thoreau and Leopold. . . .[A] book of such transformative potential that it needs to be read twice in quick succession to get the full benefit. . . . The language is luminous, the style hypnotic. Abram weaves a spell that brings the world alive.” —Resurgence “Pure enthusiasm drives Abram to explore the yearning of our body for the larger body of Earth. . . . [Abram] brings the magician’s sense of mystery and playful surprise. . . His celebratory embrace of all that surrounds him is refreshing in the extreme.” —Kirkus Reviews “As with many deeply original—and radical—books, this work may startle, even provoke the reader in its electric reversal of conventional thought. . . . [T]his is a portrait of the artist as a young raven, arguing, with all the subtlety of his mind, for the mindedness of the body. An exercise of uncanny imagination.” —Jay Griffiths, author of Wild “This brave and magical book summons wild wonder to remind us who we are.”—Amory B. Lovins, Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute “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.” —The Village Voice “Refreshing. [Abram] allows himself to be expansive, sentimental, and more than a little mad. . . . His book is transformative, animated by piercing observations and hallucinatory intensity.” —Bookforum “This startling, sparkling book challenges the technological temper of our times by returning us to the animal body in ourselves. Abram shows brilliantly how this body brings us back to Earth in a series of acutely moving descriptions of its polysensory genius. An original work of primary philosophy, it is written with verve, passion, and poetry.” —Edward S. Casey, author of The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History
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About the Author
David Abram is an ecologist, anthropologist, and philosopher who lectures and teaches widely around the world. His prior book, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, helped catalyze the emergence of several new disciplines, including the burgeoning field of ecopsychology. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, David was named by both the Utne Reader and the British journal Resurgence as one of a hundred visionaries transforming contemporary culture. His writings on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray are published in numerous magazines, scholarly journals, and anthologies. A co-founder of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), David lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.
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Product details
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage; unknown edition (September 6, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375713697
ISBN-13: 978-0375713699
Product Dimensions:
5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.6 out of 5 stars
83 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#116,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Both this, and David Abram's more scholarly "The Spell of the Sensuous", are fine works sharing my book shelf with Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" and "Teaching a Stone to Talk", my collection of "Orion" magazines, the poems of Mary Oliver and the works of Donald McCaig. I have great respect for his knowledge of and use of the English language and most of all, the wisdom he imparts in his writings, pouring it into one's mind seemingly joyfully and effortlessly, equivalently. We, who have gentle and kind feelings for this planet, but are a part of its ravaging, should try to absorb Abram's words seriously and with impassioned rapture, and learn to live by them, and feel as if in Elysium.
Rarely do I finish a book and turn to the beginning to start all over again...Becoming Animal is a poetic adventure into the roots of our being-ness ...I have a love for and an affinity with the natural world however I had not considered the life of shadows or the consciousness of mountains or the countless ways in which David Abram helped to open my senses to the teeming nature of nature all around me. I am grateful for being able to give pause to savor passages like: "We give ourselves precious little chance to taste this nourishment that springs up into us whenever we touch the ground, and so it's hardly surprising that we've forgotten the erotic nature of gravity, and the enlivening pleasure of earthly contact." or this: ..."each stone, each gust of wind, each termite-ridden log or gliding sea turtle harbors and bodies forth a creativity that resists all definition."
David Abram's *Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology*This book is so poetically beautiful and startling that it's hard to describe. Abram says "this is a book about becoming a two-legged animal, entirely a part of the animate world whose life swells within and unfolds all around us." But it's not at all suggesting that we unleash our inner beasts. Rather, Abram vividly reminds us that our minds are embodied -- not simply in physical brains but in material bodies -- bodies that co-evolved with our planet and all other life-forms that inhabit it.The best way that I can sum up this point is to say that if the mind can't be separated from the body and the body can't be separated from the world, then the mind can't be separated from the world. This insight problematizes, to say the least, the scientific pretension to objectivity, which depends on a separation between humans and the world (and mind and body) that does not exist. Abram is respectful of modern science and understands that we cannot dispense with it, but he provides an accounting of the price that we pay for being unbalanced in favor of scientific thinking and its "epistemology of domination and control" (to borrow a phrase from philosopher Jim Cheney).Abram makes a compelling case that we must begin to think and feel differently about our relationship with the earth (and its myriad inhabitants) in order to shift our trajectory away from further destruction toward recovery. In doing so, he respectfully and responsibly draws on the wisdom of indigenous cultures (again, without repudiating modernity altogether).My comments here try to capture a central point of this book, but they fall short by making the book seem merely abstract and philosophical. In fact, the book is very concrete and full of engaging personal stories. It's one of the most interesting and provocative books I've ever read.I might add that this book makes a nice complement to Thomas Nagel's *Mind and Cosmos*, which I have reviewed here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2RZM8S91AK8GR
First let me come out and say, I really loved David Abrams book Becoming Animal. I loved how eloquently it argued against philosophies of transcendence which are such an important part of most organized western religions, I loved how David described and conjured up the mystery of the natural world, and perhaps most of all I loved how he reminded us, so powerfully, of the innately expressive and conscious filled the natural world truly is. Many of his descriptions of this world reminded me of my own time studying with Navajo healers.So why not five stars? I wish I could give it 4.5 stars.As I said in the title of this review, Becoming Animal is almost perfect. It also has several not to trivial problems.One, Abram rails against those who criticize writers who romanticize the hunter/gatherer - indigenous cultures of the world and of the past. He points out, in a lengthy footnote, how those same critics tend to romanticize the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, yet shower contempt on those who write favorably about indigenous cultures. And I could not agree more strongly. Yet, Abram does romanticize these worlds. As beautifully as he extols their power and their connection with earth-based life, he totally ignores their own internal pressures to conform, as well as their often savage cruelty they visit upon their neighbors. In the book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Jonathan Lear deftly describes the unceasing violence visited upon the Crow Nation by their traditional and more powerful enemy the Lakota. And this is one of countless stories of cultures dedicated to frequent violence and mindless animosity (not that are free of these very same vicissitudes). Often the reticence of these societies to innovate is a consequence of internal pressures to conform. Such stressors to internally conform in these societies often become unbreakable obstacles to innovation.One of the core themes of Becoming Animal is the rootedness these traditional societies have with the Earth on which they live. But many of these same societies lack this rootedness, including several Abram mentions. The life on the high plains of such tribes as the Cheyenne and Lakota were very recent phenomena made possible by the acquisition of the horse, introduced into the Americas by the Spanish. Life on the high plains began with these tribes at around the same time it began with the European invaders. Many of these tribal groups are highly nomadic. The Navajo entered the 4 Corners region of the US around 1450 after a long migration from Arctic Canada beginning around 1300. They arrived in the Southwest not so long before the Spanish entered that same region. Thus the argument for ageless rootedness often falls apart.And these are just several of hundreds of possible examples.Toward the end of the book, Abram unfortunately unleashes an attack on evolutionary theory by setting up a straw man hypothesis based on his projection that the science of evolution is too mechanistic and unwelcome to the complex web of inter-communication that he observes in the natural world. But such mechanistic models are exactly what modern science has, itself, rebuked. While the statistical incidence of mutation is random, how these random changes manifest and evolve in the complex eco-systems of the planet are entirely a consequence of the very same, rich and complex layers of inter-communication described and extolled so lovingly by Abram. Her really fails to get his critique right and the book suffers as a result.Finally, his criticisms of the cartesian world are uncompelling. The world he correctly criticizes is, itself, a consequence of cultural and historical memes that go far deeper in the human story than what Abram describes. More compelling and evidence based critiques are raised by Morris Berman (see: Wandering God and my own writings, Liberation from the Lie. The emergence of mechanistic, soulless models was rooted in far deeper human cultural soil than what Abram presents in this book. I recommend each of these books for a more sweeping and compelling accounts for the degradation of the planets and social/individual life that resulted from the abandonment of the earthcentric life that forms the centerpiece of this book.Abram is fantastic as a writer of narrative and some of my favorite passages are taken, directly, from his own life. I really loved his description of his kayaking off the coast of Alaska and encountering a colony of sea lions and how he responded to their sudden appearance with such brilliant and connected expression,. The personal quality of this book is really terrific.But sometimes his use of language becomes too labored and flowery. Sometimes, it sounded strained, like he was working too hard to convince the reader of how smart and sensitive he is.Nonetheless, this is an extremely valuable book and I really admire Abram for his originality, the challenge of the subject matter, and the power of this critically important message. This is a book that we need to read and absorb.
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