Harrell - Abram

In the book, The Spell of the Sensuous, author David Abram discusses how a tribal culture in Asia performed magic to ensure their land was protected and was producing food. Throughout the text, Abram tackles the question of, how Western civilization become so estranged from nonhuman nature that we condone the ongoing destruction of forests, rivers, valleys, species and ecosystems? Abram's venture to answering this dilemma led him to interacting with shamans in Nepal and sorcerers in Indonesia, where he studied how traditional healers monitor relations between the human community and the animate environment. Coming to the conclusion that the alphabet has triggered a trend toward increasing abstraction and alienation from nature, I find that he makes great arguments throughout the text showing how exactly advances in the technological world has produced an even more distant connection between individuals and the world in which they live in. I really enjoyed this text and found it to be extremely useful in the overall theme of the class, especially when describing how the primal and modern world hold a differing view of nature. 

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