Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology [Hardcover]

David Abram (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 24, 2010

David Abram’s first book, The Spell of the Sensuous—hailed as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring and truly original” by Science—has become a classic of environmental literature. Now Abram returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature.
 
As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve inured ourselves to the wild intelligence of our muscled flesh, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. This book subverts that distance, drawing readers ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the body and the breathing Earth.
 
The shapeshifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in Abram’s investigation. He shows that from the awakened perspective of the human animal, awareness (or mind) is not an exclusive possession of our species but a lucid quality of the biosphere itself—a quality in which we, along with the oaks and the spiders, steadily participate.
 
With the audacity of its vision and the luminosity of its prose, Becoming Animal sets a new benchmark for the human appraisal of our place in the whole.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Richard Louv Reviews Becoming Animal

Richard Louv is the author of seven books, including Last Child in the Woods. He is the chairman of the Children & Nature Network, and has served as adviser to the Ford Foundation's Leadership for a Changing World award program and the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. Read his review of Becoming Animal:

David Abram is unique among interpreters of the wild voice within us. His first book, The Spell of the Sensuous, has become a touchstone for a needed shift in our thinking about the place of humans in the world. As the poet Gary Snyder remarked, that book helped map us back into the world. In his new book, Becoming Animal, Abram offers a startling new exploration of our entanglement with the rest of nature. This time, his focus is the intimate but sadly forgotten relationship between our bodies and the earth. By excavating the most ordinary and familiar of our experiences--the perception of shadow, the recognition of depth, the transience of mood--he re-opens for us the knowing that our bodies are intertwined with the flesh of the earth. I cannot imagine another book that so gently and so persuasively alters how we look at ourselves, and reminds us that sentience was never our private possession, that our very awareness is a means of participating in a more than human world. At no other time in Western history have we needed to listen to the wild voice within us, and to Dave Abram's, as much as we do today.

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From Booklist

*Starred Review* How did our curious, inventive species go from worshiping nature to destroying it? A creative and visionary ecologist and philosopher, Abram addressed this complex and urgent question in his influential first book, Spell of the Sensuous (1996). In his second provocative, boldly recalibrating blend of stories, reflections, and discoveries, he offers perception-heightening insights into the causes of our disparagement of “sensuous reality,” or “bodied existence,” and the disastrous consequences of our increasing detachment from the living world as we funnel our attention to the cyber realm. As Abram identifies underappreciated aspects of our minds and bodies that evolved to enable us to respond with exquisite sensitivity to our surroundings, he tells extraordinary tales of his encounters with wildlife from whales to ravens, illuminates the planet’s myriad forms of sentient life, and elucidates the significance of oral culture. In addition to writing with poetic precision about sensory experience—his analysis of shadows and life’s reciprocity are phenomenal feats of observation and eloquence—he also draws on his adventures as an itinerant sleight-of-hand magician and apprentice to indigenous shamans to forge an inspirited physics of being. We can’t “restore” nature, Abram writes, without “restorying” life, hence his prodigious, transfixing, and rectifying “earthly cosmology.” --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (August 24, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375421718
• ISBN-13: 978-0375421716
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #144,864 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #69 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Epistemology

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

85 of 88 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Becoming Animal by recovering our essential humanness October 29, 2010

By Glenn Aparicio Parry

Format:Hardcover

If you have read Abram's impressive first book, The Spell of the Sensuous, you have probably been, like me, breathlessly awaiting his second. While the first book was a hard act to follow - being both a scholarly and passionate plea for humanity to recover its sense of humanness by recovering its immediate connection to what is other than human - his second equally wonderful book, Becoming Animal, is different. Abram makes no bones about not attempting the same comprehensive and scholarly review. Instead, he gives us a far more personal account of his journey into discovery of his animal and ultimately human self.

The result is another sublime work. Abram takes us through a variety of experiences in his daily life, some exotic, some mundane, but always immediate and present. It is a courageous work, taking us inside his life in a very intimate and direct way. Whether he is chronicling his baby daughter's spontaneous connection to a stone, his own adventures shapeshifting with ravens and shamans atop the Himalayas, his lament in leaving a rental home, or his clumsy attempts to fix a vacuum cleaner - Abram always maintains the same attention to presence. The book as a whole is an original guide to a way of thinking, seeing and interacting with the sensuous, breathing world.

Becoming Animal is a bit like entering a hypnotic trance, which is clearly Abram's intention. Every sentence embodies the message - keeping a rhythm, a pulse - just like the moving, breathing earth he speaks of. The sentences are a microcosm of the book, bringing together seamlessly what at first appear as diverse, unrelated experience. In the end, in a wholly personal way, he reprises some of the themes of his first book: that we need to reawaken our senses to the speaking, sensuous earth, that the written word and abstract thinking that pervades our society must be rebalanced by a restoration - a "restorying" of the land herself; that "rejuvenation of oral culture is an ecological imperative." He doesn't seek to eliminate abstract thinking or technology; he simply asks us to remember where it was abstracted from, so that we can remember our true origins and recover our essential humanness.

In short, it is another masterpiece from one of our most gifted contemporary storytellers.

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Medicine October 28, 2010

By Amy Hannon

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Thomas Berry diagnosed the ailment of our culture as autism. In a similar vein, Richard Louv called it nature-deficit disorder. Either way David Abram's new book, Becoming Animal, is good medicine for our entrancement with the written word and the electronic screens which flatten our world to two dimensions. In the philosophical tradition of the phenomenologists describing our different forms of alienation, this book lures us back to our authentic heritage as evolutionary cousins to both the stars and all the animals. It draws on insights unveiled in Abram's earlier masterpiece, The Spell of the Sensuous, but unfolds them like a Chinese puzzle to reveal ceaseless horizons of meaning hiding in our most common experience from seeing our shadows, hearing birdsong or sensing the dyanamism of a rock face in our path.

I especially love the reverend way Abram enfolds key ideas from the western Religions of the Book into our primal experience, explaining the metaphysics of angels and even of God, without any diminution of either concept but only expanded joy and access.

This is a marvelous, and yes, a magical book. Along with The Spell of the Sensuous, it will stand as a new classic in American philosophy and nature writing.

42 of 45 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This book actually deserves all five stars October 27, 2010

By snowy owl books

Format:Hardcover

For once I have found the enigma of a book that deserves all 5 stars from Amazon for it's gutsy interpretation of an old subject we rarely want to discuss. The human animal and his or her relation to the wild, how it creates thought and intelligence and even rationale. Let's examine how being more like an animal might do us some good....and less like a rational coldly removed abstract being bent on knowing truth by studying even more of the abstract. We have forgotten that experience in nature qualifies the true source of human development. Our surest form of truth is within the mystery of nature, everyday nature as perceived through our senses is what can bring us the most equitable and perhaps the most satisfyingly human encounter of the cosmos- not the science of quarks, genetics, microcosms, stellar phenomenon and such... though they may thrill with glitzy peeks of an unknown invisible universe at extravagant cost. This book is just incredibly different than others, as is the author and his divergent knowledge and experience of culture, city and mountains, he apprentices the world with a desire to understand how humans identify with the Earth- Remarkably honest, this man strides through sentences in a sort of bare nakedness of truth we have been longing to hear but somehow have not been able to say a word about in the last few centuries or so. It is complete ecstatic freedom and joy to read this authors uplifting work on the nature of being human - not the ever dualistic based "Human nature" that still pervades science and modern thought. How can you not enjoy a visionary work from a man whose very keen senses leads us all over the globes, face to face with mountains, magicians, shamanic creatures, old cities, and take us into the deepest observational realms of leaving our skin to soar like a bird. Magnificently done, now keep writing!!!