A Brief Summary of Animism
by Jason Godesky
The Spell of the Sensuous
By David Abram
Summarizing Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous is a difficult task. Not since Ishmael have my thoughts been so turned upside-down by a book. Abram fully understands the powerful magic of language, and uses it to full effect in this volume, as he uses it to show us that magic itself. Along the way, Abram offers a stunning and authoritative answer to Zerzan’s critique of language by showing us that language is not an arbitrary abstraction at all, but firmly rooted in our ecology. To begin a summary of Abram’s book, it may be easiest to work backwards from the starting point of Western philosophy, for as Alfred Whitehead (we’ve discussed one of his pithy aphorisms before) put it, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
Plato’s philosophy was grounded in the notion of a separation between the visible world around us, and a “true” world of ideals.
Platonism has traditionally been interpreted as a form of metaphysical dualism, sometimes referred to as Platonic realism, and is regarded as one of the earlier representatives of metaphysical objective idealism. According to this reading, Plato’s metaphysics divides the world into two distinct aspects: the intelligible world of “forms”, and the perceptual world we see around us. The perceptual world consists of imperfect copies of the intelligible forms or ideas. These forms are unchangeable and perfect, and are only comprehensible by the use of the intellect or understanding, that is, a capacity of the mind that does not include sense-perception or imagination. This division can also be found in Zoroastrian philosophy, in which the dichotomy is referenced as the Minu (intelligence) and Giti (perceptual) worlds. The Zoroastrian ideal city, Shahrivar, also exhibits certain similarities with Plato’s Republic. The existence and direction of influence here is uncertain; while Zoroaster lived well before Plato, few of the earliest writings of Zoroastrianism survive unaltered.1
Thus, Western philosophy begins, essentially, with Plato telling us to doubt our sensuous experience of the world, that our sensuous experience is illusory; true reality lies in the world of forms, of which our perceptual world is but an imperfect copy. The world of forms, separated from our sensuous experience, can only be experienced through reason.
Abram highlights a critical, but much overlooked, coincidence of history. At the same time that Socrates and Plato were formulating their philosophy, the Greek alphabet became a standard part of Athenian education. The Greek alphabet had existed for some time before that, but it had been a specialized tool, sometimes as a mnemonic device for epic poets, or as a means of keeping track of inventories, etc., but it was only in Plato’s time that literacy became a widespread social expectation, only then that Athenian society became a truly literate society.
Abram points out that this is no mere coincidence. Plato formulates the first literate philosophy, a philosophy grounded in literacy and the alphabet. Only with writing could we critically analyze abstract “forms” separated from our sensuous experience. Prior to that, the concept of a “tree” was firmly rooted in our sensuous experience of trees. With writing, it became possible to form an idea of “tree,” without ever actually seeing, or touching, or smelling one. Our senses are our only connection to the world around us, and in Plato’s time, it became possible to shut them off entirely, and live solely in an abstract world of reason and intellect—a world where only human voices could be heard.
Of course, that sealing off did not begin with Plato at all. Abram traces the Greek alphabet back, and notes the same magic in writing found in other pre-literate cultures, such as with Norse runes, Egyptian heiroglyphs (literally, “holy symbols”), or Kabbalistic ideas about the Hebrew alphabet. Abram points out that the Hebrew alphabet has no vowels. The sounded breath, the missing key in the text, must be applied with each reading, so each reading is an interaction with the text, each reading is interpretive. G-d’s word is not a dead corpse pinned to the page, but a living thing to be contended with in each passing generation. The sounded breath—our words for “spirit,” “animate” and “psyche” all derive from words for “breath”—is required to “animate” the text—to bring it to life.
The letters of the Hebrew alphabet are themselves depictions of things in our sensuous experience of the world: aleph is an ox, beth a house, and so on. They began as a kind of rebus. Pictorial representations of things were easy enough, and we could translate them using the same synaesthetic magic that allowed us to read the tracks of animals and know their gender, age, weight, height, even the intimate secrets of their life.
Writing, like human language, is engendered not only within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more-than-human world. The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, for the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black sash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read there in the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. Archaeological evidence suggest that for more than a million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces—a bit of scat here a broken twig there—of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning which would be the meeting with the Other.
To represent abstract things that could not easily be represented, we often resorted to rebuses, and thus crossed a major threshold, wherein symbols ceased to represent things in the sensuous world, and instead represented the sounds of human speech. It was a step in us turning inwards, from a culture deeply informed by the life of the ecology around us, to one that is isolated, groundless, and focused entirely inward on itself.
The Hebrew alphabet was such a rebus, but with its lack of vowels, and its representations of actual things, it still left a door open. When the alphabet came to Greece, however, that door was slammed shut. The Hebrew ox, aleph, became the Greek alpha—meaningless in itself, a mere human sound. Perhaps even more importantly, because Greek and Hebrew were different languages, there were several Hebrew letters “left over” when it was converted into Greek. These, the Greeks used to represent vowels.
Is it any surprise, then, that Plato emerges at the very time that the Greek alphabet gains its ascendancy, promoting the first truly literate philosophy—a philosophy that enjoins us to reject our direct, sensuous experience of the world in favor of the pure world of “forms” that can only be understood by reason—by the literate intellect? Abram compares Plato to Homer, whose Illiad and Odyssey, written centuries before Plato, used writing for a very different purpose: as a means of recording an oral performance, not by any means to replace it. Plato himself shows some distinct doubts about writing in Phaedrus. In it, Plato records a story (doubtless one of his many invented myths) about the Egyptian king Thamus, being offered the gift of writing by the god Thoth.
But when they came to letters, “This,” said Thoth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.”
Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Thoth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
“The show of wisdom without the reality” reminded me immediately, of course, of Daniel Quinn’s exegesis of the Genesis story in Ishmael: the knowledge of good and evil was knowledge only the gods could have. Eating of the tree did not give humans this knowledge; it only made us think we possessed it, and now possessed of that terrible conceit, we have proceeded to lay waste to all Creation.
But at the same time, in tracing this back, we can see that writing is a powerful magic—a magic so powerful it has shaped our minds and created our culture. Even today, in our cynical, literate age, we acknowledge the magic of the alphabet.
Everything that we speak of as Western civilization we could speak of as alphabetic civilization. We are the culture of the alphabet, and the alphabet itself could be seen as a very potent form of magic. You know, we open up the newspaper in the morning and we focus our eyes on these little inert bits of ink on the page, and we immediately hear voices and we see visions and we experience conversations happening in other places and times. That is magic!
It’s outrageous: as soon as we look at these printed letters on the page we see what they say. They speak to us. That is not so different from a Hopi elder stepping out of her pueblo and focusing her eyes on a stone and hearing the stone speak. Or a Lakota man stepping out and seeing a spider crawling up a tree and focusing his eyes on that spider and hearing himself addressed by that spider. We do just the same thing, but we do it with our own written marks on the page. We look at them, and they speak to us. It’s an intensely concentrated form of animism. But it’s animism nonetheless, as outrageous as a talking stone.
In fact, it’s such an intense form of animism that it has effectively eclipsed all of the other forms of animistic participation in which we used to engage — with leaves, with stones, with winds. But it is still a form of magic.2
Therein lies the problem, though: the alphabet is the only kind of magic we still recognize. Language has become a purely human concern, and as a consequence, language has been cut off from its root. It is no longer nourished by the non-human communities that surround us. It exists only in its own, little bubble; we’re left simply talking to ourselves.
Our assumptions have been deeply informed by the dualism of Plato, and later, Descartes. When we say a word like “spirit,” we think of something “supernatural”—beyond natural, as if the natural world were a lower order of being to be surpassed. In fact, that is precisely what Plato says it is, isn’t it? The “spirit” belongs to the perfect world of “forms.” Our philosophy begins by cutting at the root of animism, the deepest blasphemy animism allows: forsaking our sensuous experience of the world around us. Abram’s approach is informed by phenomenology—an approach that attempts to discern our direct experience of the world, unfiltered by our ideas and assumptions. Abram reminds us that even our words for these “supernatural” entities ultimately derive from various words for “breath.” It was the air itself that formed the invisible, magical essence of the present—just like the horizon is pregnant with the future, and the past is buried beneath our feet. In our direct experience, space and time are indistinguishable—it is only when we separate ourselves from our own experience that we can create such artificial abstractions as perfectly featureless Euclidian space, as separated from time. In our experience, every place exists in a given time, and every time in a given place; they are indistinguishable. Newtonian physics was based on the literate abstractions of our world; it took centuries, and Albert Einstein, to bring our science far enough to recognize what every child intuitively knows: space and time are one.
This brings us to the very essence of animism: a radical rejection of Cartesian dualism, the recognition that we are our bodies and not an ephemeral spirit wrapped in an arbitrary fleshy shell, and the simple belief in our own experience. Atheists often assert that they only believe what they can experience for themselves, but this is not true; they do not trust their own experience, they trust the abstractions of their own reason. It is the animist that trusts his own experience and nothing else.
To be sure there has always been some confusion between our Western notion of “spirit” (which so often is defined in contrast to matter or “flesh”), and the mysterious presences to which tribal and indigenous cultures pay so much respect. Many of the earliest Western students of these other languages and customs were Christian missionaries all too ready to see occult ghosts and immaterial spirits where the tribespeople were simply offering their respect to the local winds. While the notion of “spirit” has come to have, for us in the West, a primarily anthropomorphic or human association, my encounter with the ants was the first of many experiences suggesting to me that the “spirits” of an indigenous culture are primarily those modes of intelligence or awareness that do not possess a human form.
As humans we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body—we live our own bodies and so know, from within, the possibilities of our form. We cannot know, with the same familiarity and intimacy, the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle, nor can we readily experience the precise sensations of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower, or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight. Our experience may well be a variant of these other modes of sensitivity; nevertheless we cannot, as humans, experience entirely the living sensations of another form. We do not know, with full clarity, their desires or motivations—we cannot know, or can never be sure that we know, what they know. That the deer experiences sensations, that it carries knowledge of how to orient in the land, of where to find food and how to protect its young, that it knows well how to survive in the forest witbout the tools upon which we depend, is readily evident to our human senses. That the mango tree has the ability to create or bear fruit, or the yarrow plant the power to reduce a child’s fever, is also evident. To humankind, these Others are purveyors of secrets, carriers of intelligence that we ourselves often need: it is these Others who can inform us of unseasonable changes in the weather, or warn us of imminent eruptions and earthquakes—who show us, when we are foraging, where we may find the best food or the best route back home. We receive from them countless gifts of food, fuel, shelter, and clothing. Yet still they remain Other to us, inhabiting their own cultures and enacting their own rituals, never wholly fathomable. Finally, it is not only those entities acknowledged by Western civilization as “alive,” not only the other animals or the plants that speak, as spirits, to the senses of an oral culture, but also the meandering river from which those animals drink, and the torrential monsoon rains, and the stone that fits neatly into the palm of the hand. …
My exposure to traditional magicians and seers was gradually shifting my senses; I became increasingly susceptible to the solicitations of nonhuman things. When a magician spoke of a power or “presence” lingering in the corner of his house, I learned to notice the ray of sunlight that was then pouring through a chink in the wall, illuminating a column of drifting dust, and to realize that that column of light was indeed a power, influencing the air currents by its warmth, and indeed influencing the whole mood of the room; although I had not consciously seen it before, it had already been structuring my experience. My ears began to attend, in a new way, to the songs of birds—no longer just a melodic background to human speech, but meaningful speech in its own right, responding to and commenting on events in the surrounding Earth. I became a student of subtle differences: the way a breeze might flutter a single leaf on a tree, leaving the others silent and unmoved (had not that leaf, then, been brushed by a magic?); or how the intensity of the sun’s heat expresses itself in the precise rhythm of the crickets.
Animists do not believe in spirits; they are surrounded by them, plain to see, all around, all the time. Abram, trained as a sleight-of-hand magician, comes to an understand of what magic truly is. Mired in our dualism, we see magic as a supernatural violation of our mechanistic world. This dualism is, itself, a violation of our sensuous experience of the living world around us. We experience the world as a living thing; when we touch a tree, we also feel the tree touching us. To maintain this bizarre notion of a dead, clockwork where only humans are truly living, we must retreat regularly to the safe domain of our alphabet, and listen to the reassuring hum of our own voices. Magic—the prophetic powers of a sorcerer, or the ability of a shaman to heal—is rejected out of hand as a blasphemy against the fragile faith we cling to. When we discover the mechanisms, we dismiss it derisively as a “trick.”
London: Do we have any equivalents of medicine people in Western culture, people who perform a similar function?
Abram: We do have some distant equivalents, such as field biologists who are able to enter into a close rapport with the other species that they are studying. But we tend not to believe in magic in Western civilization. And so we’ve largely forgotten the place of magic. Most magicians end up performing somewhere like Las Vegas. They see themselves as “illusionists”—as people trying to create the illusion of magic. But they themselves don’t believe in magic. What a sad state the craft of magic has fallen into in the world. It would be as if most musicians and concert artists didn’t really believe that real music existed. Then you would have pianists who had pianos with flashing lights all over them and women dancing in sequence around them as they played their flashy music. Magic has been reduced to that in the West. It really doesn’t exist for us anymore.
London: What happens to a culture bereft of magic?
Abram: One thing is that its relation to the natural landscape is tremendously impoverished. In fact, by our obliviousness, by our forgetfulness of all of these other styles of awareness—the other animals, the plants, the waters—we have brought about a crisis in the natural world of unprecedented proportions—not out of any meanness, but simply because we really don’t recognize that nature is there. It seems to us, in our culture, to be a kind of passive backdrop against which all of our human events unfold, and it’s human events that are meaningful and what happens in nature, well, we don’t really notice it, it’s not really there. It’s not vital.
How different that is from the awareness of a magical or animistic culture for whom everything we do as humans is so profoundly influenced by our interactions with the earth underfoot and the air that swirls around us and the other animals.3
Abram does not leave us in despair for the inevitability of this state of affairs, though. Language does not have to cut us off from the non-human communities around us; in fact, it can help connect us to them, in surprisingly powerful ways.
Hunting, for indigenous, oral community, entails abilities and sensitivities very different from those associated with hunting in technological civilization. Without guns or gunpowder, a native hunter must often come much closer to his wild prey if he is to take its life. Closer, that is , not just physically but emotionally, empathically entering into proximity within the other animal’s ways of sensing and experiencing. The native hunter, in effect, must apprentice himself to those animals that he would kill. Though long and careful observation, enhanced at times by ritual identification and mimesis, the hunter gradually develops an instinctive knowledge of the habits of his prey, of its fears and its pleasures, its preferred foods and favored haunts. Nothing is more integral to this practice than learning the communicative signs, gestures, and cries of the local animals. Knowledge of the sounds by which a monkey indicates to the others in its band that it has located a good source of food, or the cries by which a particular bird signals distress, or by which another attacks a mate, enables the hunter to anticipate both the large-scale and small-scale movements of various animals. A familiarity with animal calls and cries provides the hunter, as well, with an expanded set of senses, an awareness of events happening beyond his field of vision, hidden by the forest leaves or obscured by the dark of night. Moreover, the skilled human hunter often can generate and mimic such sounds himself, and it is this that enables him to enter most directly into the society of other animals.
One of the most revealing twentieth-century accounts of a relatively intact indigenous community is that recorded by F. Bruce Lamb from the spoken recollections of the Peruvian doctor Manuel Cόrdova-Rios. Cόrdova-Rios was captured in 1907, when he was fifteen years old, by a small tribe of Amahuaca Indians living deep in the Amazonian rain forest (between the headwaters of the Juruá, Purús, Madre de Dios, and Inuya rivers)—probably the remnant of a larger tribe decimated by the incursion of the rubber-tapping industry into the forest. He was carefully trained by the headman of this small tribe to become his successor, and was for six years meticulously tutored in the ways of the hunt, in the medicinal and magical powers of the rain forest plants, and in the traditional preparation and use of the extracts from the ayahuasca vine to attain, when necessary, a clairvoyant state of fusion with the enveloping jungle ecosystem.
Curiously, the tribe’s language, which remained largely meaningless to Cόrdova-Rios for six months or more, became understandable to his ears only as his senses became attuned to the subtleties of the rain forest ecology in which the culture was embedded. He did, eventually, become headman of the tribe, yet he fled the rain forest the following year after a series of attempts on his life by a neighboring band.
Cόrdova-Rios’s descriptions of the various hunts in which he participated make vividly evident the extent to which these people’s senses were directly coupled to the enveloping forest:
They reacted to the faintest signals of sound and smell, intuitievely relating them to all other conditions of the environment and then interpreting them to achieve the greatest possible capture of game … Many of the best hunters seemed to know by some special extra sense just where to find the game they sought, or they had developed some special methiod of drawing game to them. Knowing how to imitate and to use the signals the animals made to communicate between their kind in various situations helped in locating game and drawing it within sighting range of an astute hunter.
In the course of Cόrdova-Rios’s account, we read careful descriptions of hunters sequestered in the foliage of high fruit trees luring partridges toward them with mimicked bird calls signaling the discovery of an abundant food source. We read of one hunter who, upon hearing a band of monkeys moving thought the dense forest canopy overhead, utters a cry that would be made by a baby monkey if it had fallen to the ground. This call stops the roving monkeys and brings them down beneath the thick foliage into the hunter’s arrow range; the hunter shoots tow of them to feed his family. Later Cόrdova-Rios’s native comrades teach him, through imitation, the principal vocal signals of a species of wild pig that they are hunting.
Is it fair to call this “magic,” or simply a sense of awe for the natural world? Here we have indigenous people who cannot only understand the language of animals, they can actually speak to them, and be understood. They can listen to the non-human communities around them to effectively “predict the future,” by relying on non-human senses. Or, consider Abram’s example of the Koyukon, and their close rapport with birds:
In Koyukon belief, the other animals and the plants once shared a common language with human beings. This was in the Distant Time (Kd’adonts’idnee) a time when all living beings “shared on society and went through dreamlike transutations from animals or plants to humans, and sometimes back again.” …
The lilting cries of the common loon are linguistically meaningful to the Koyukon. According to one man, “Sometimes people will hunt the loon, but me, I don’t like to kill it. I like to listen to it all I can and pick up the words it knows.” The speech of the rare yellow-billed loon is still more powerful than that of the common loon to the Koyukon: “…it says the same words, but its voice is just a little different.”
The assumption that nature is all aware, and that the sounds made by animals are at least as meaningful as those made by humans, leads the Koyukon to listen attentively to subtle nuances and variations in the calls of local birds. The Koyukon names for birds are often highly onomatopoeic, so that in speaking their names one is also echoing their cries. The Artic tern (k’idagaas’), the northern phalarope (tiyee), the rusty blackbird (ts’uhutlts’eegga), the blackpoll warbler (k’oot’anh), the slate colored junco (k’it’otlt’ahga)—all have such names. Written transcription, however, cannot convey the remarkable aptness of these names, which when spoken in Koyukon have a lilting, often whistle like quality. The interpenetration of human and nonhuman utterances is particularly vivid in the case of numerous bird songs that seem to enunciate whole phrases or statements in Koyukon.
Many bird calls are interpreted as Koyukon words … what is striking about these words is how perfectly they mirror the call’s pattern, so that someone outside the tribe who knows birdsongs can readily identify the species when the words are spoken in Koyukon. Not only the rhythym comes through, but also some of the tone, the “feel” that goes with it.
As we ponder such correspondences, we come to realize that the sounds and rhythyms of the Koyukon language have been deeply nourished by these nonhuman voices.
Hence the whirring, flutelike phrases of the hermit thrush, which sound in the forest thickest at twilight, speak the Koyukon words sook’eeyis deeyo—”it is a fine evening.” The thrushes also sometimes speak the phrase nahutl-eeyh—literally, “a sign of the spirit is perceived.” The thrush first uttered these words in the Distant Time, when it sensed a ghost nearby, and even today the call may be heard as a warning.
For Abram, this is the essence of magic, and he makes a compelling case, compounding example after example of the profound ways in which indigenous human communities engage the non-human communities around them. Those non-human voices nourish our human discourse; without that non-human input, our own language grows old, stale, and worn, and our own ability to communicate with one another breaks down.
Zerzan has criticized language as a purely human abstraction that cuts us off from the sensuous experience of the world, but Abram commits linguistic heresy, and instead finds that language is deeply rooted in that same experience, in the same ecology that sustains us. Language, linguists insist, is a purely human domain, a world of arbitrary symbols given meaning by human choice. Abrams finds the origins of language in the calls of local birds, the croaking of frogs, the rustling of leaves, the voice of nearby rivers, and the “language” of the non-human communities that surround us. Our languages are shaped by the ambience of our ecology, a rhythm and flow that reflects the rhythm and flow of the ecology we live in, with words and phrases taken from the animals themselves. Abram traces the deep foundations of language and thought in the landscape itself, and how, to remove an indigenous people from their land is to literally drive them out of their minds.
There is an innate magic in language, a synaesthetic alchemy that conveys meaning from one mind to another through the medium of a living, sensuous world. Our words are carried on the air, an invisible force that envelops us and sustains us, a mystery so powerful it gave us our words for “spirit” and “psyche” and “animate.” It allows us to form a human community, as vital (or even more) for us as it is for any other species. There’s nothing wrong in forming a human community, any more than there is in wolves forming a community, or trees. Our community, just like a wolf pack, is sustained by communication. The negative implication of community is exclusivity—any community must be defined in both positive (who is included) and negative (who is not) terms. The problem does not arise from forming a community, but from sealing off a community, and refusing to engage the communities around us.
In Ishmael, Daniel Quinn tells us how desperately we need a new vision. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram tells us how to create exactly that.
I’ll have to read The Spell of the Sensuous for myself, it sounds interesting.
I’m a little confused about what this means for animism, though. I think that the characterization of animism and of magic that you talk about above could be equally well described as an excellence of skill. They do not require as a basis of explanation any metaphysical properties of “spirit”; in fact it seems almost as if you’re defining “spirit” in such a way that it is not metaphysical at all.
Comment by scruff — 28 August 2006 @ 5:24 PM
Exactly. The very idea of a “metaphysical” implies the separation of life from the sensuous world: the same dualism that you find in Plato, Descartes, etc. We’ve yet to find a real definition for “life,” because it’s so heavily rooted in our ephemeral sense of the spiritual and the sacred. Animism does not separate the locus of life and sanctity from the world around us. Life is a property of the sensuous world, not some alien force to it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 August 2006 @ 5:29 PM
I’m not sure how I want to respond to the issue of “life”, yet, but I will say that I don’t think the idea of “metaphysical” implies separation, as such. Immanence and Transcendence can go hand in hand; transcendence does not imply NOT immanence, but it seems as if you’re taking it as given that immanence implies NOT transcendence.
I’ll try to put it a bit more clearly: when I say that “spirit” is “metaphysical”, I mean that it has qualities or capacities which allow it to function in ways not explaianble by purely physical mechanisms.
Example: a non-metaphysical-animist hunter can find the location of an animal he hunts by a savant understanding and perception of the physical conditions involved in the world that the hunter and animal share. He can look at the sky and judge the weather, he can look at the tracks on the ground, he can combine all of this data in his mind with what he knows of the animal’s behavior and thereby predict where it will be going at this time of day and where he will need to go to catch it. This process uses basically physical phenomena to meet the goal.
A metaphysical-animist hunter can find the location of an animal he hunts even if the animal is breaking normal behavior patterns and without having perceived the state of the physical world first. Without knowing the state of the weather, without looking at tracks, he may have a “vision” of the animal coming to a place he may never expect it to be, but he might take his weapons and find it there nonetheless. This process does not use normal physical investigation procedures. It involves essentially a paranormal non-local non-temporal transfer of information.
I suppose what I’m asking you is, as an anthropologist, is real-world animism as you have previously understood it in non-civilized societies primarily non-metaphysical in nature, or does it include metaphysical functions?
Because it is my understanding of animism that metaphysical functions are implied, and I’m wondering why Abram didn’t seem to come across any of this.
Comment by scruff — 28 August 2006 @ 5:53 PM
No? Then why does it have a name of its own? If the “metaphysical” is the same as the “physical,” why does it have a separate name?
The hand-waving priests so often fall back to, I’m afraid that immanence very much is the opposite of transcendence. This is precisely why this has been such a major theological issue.
Yes, but why must this be a feature of spirit? After all, spiritus is simply “breath”—entirely explainable in purely physical mechanisms.
Does it? Or does the hunter-gatherer simply have enough trust in his own senses that he can rely on his own subconscious, and put subliminal clues together more effectively and more quickly because he trusts his instincts? See Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink for some excellent purely physical explanations for exactly the kind of phenomenon you’re talking about.
What Abram reveals is that our assignation of “metaphysical” properties to animist spirits is simply projection of our own dualism onto other cultures.
In a sense, then, the main difference between our view and the animist view is that we see a dead, clockwork, mechanistic world; animists see a living, animate world. Abram came across plenty of accounts of “metaphysical” spirits, but they all owed more to the anthropologist than the people they studied. Or, to quote Jonathan Ott:
We do not experience the world as separated into sensuous reality, and ideal “Forms.” What we experience directly is a living world, a world full of alien intelligence. Children must be taught not to anthropomorphize everything around them, and treat even “inanimate” objects as living intelligences. This distinction, this dualism, is a bizarre superstition fostered by the psychological ramifications of the alphabet. Why would we expect this strange notion to be shared by oral cultures?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 August 2006 @ 6:33 PM
If the “metaphysical” is the same as the “physical,” why does it have a separate name?
We’re getting into some fairly complex and difficult problems with the language here. I do not mean to suggest that the terms “physical” and “metaphysical” denote identical concepts. “Metaphysical” is used to describe the quality of being beyond purely physical. What I mean to suggest is that when a philosophy addresses certain things as having metaphysical qualities, it does not necessarily imply that “life” and “sanctity” are not also applicable term to physical realities. It might merely imply that “life” and “sanctity” also have metaphysical natures. Not that life is separate from what we experience sensually, but that there is also more to it than what we experience sensually.
I’m afraid that immanence very much is the opposite of transcendence.
It seems to me that by making this statement you are validating a dualistic worldview. The problem of immanence/transcendence is mired in dualistic mindsets. If one assumes a holistic worldview, it is possible to approach the use of the terms “immanence” and “transcendence” as having value to offer without being opposing philosophies. The same applies to the terms “physical” and “metaphysical”.
Yes, but why must this be a feature of spirit? After all, spiritus is simply “breath”—entirely explainable in purely physical mechanisms.
This is another language problem I think: by the application of words which originate in physical reality to ideas about what metaphysical reality might be like, we run the risk of confusing one meaning for the other, and I think that’s what you’re doing here. It’s the old buddhist finger pointing at the moon conundrum.
That which is metaphysical is that which cannot be perceived through physical means. For example, a physicist once described to me the concept of treating energy as a metaphysical construct as valid because the energy itself cannot be perceived, we infer its existence from the behavior of the physical objects we can perceive.
Similarly, one may postulate that there exist entities/forces/principles in the world which are not visible or tangible and yet which affect things which are visible and tangible.
The application of the term “spirit” or “breath” to describe those postulated entities/forces/principles is essentially a metaphorical one, meant to build upon previous understanding of something known to lead to new understanding of something unknown.
Like if you ask me if I was an animal, what kind of an animal would I be, and I say “cat”, that doesn’t mean I’m a cat, it’s a metaphor meant to convey understanding about myself to you.
The term “spiritus” may have originally referred to physically explainable breath, but it is now also applicable to metaphysical forces. Along those lines, in the culture we both live in, the term “animism” has come to have connotations of dealing with spirits in the metaphysical sense of the word. So when Abram addresses members of this culture and describes animism as something which requires no metaphysical qualities, he’s using an abnormal definition of the term “animism” (abnormal to this culture). Whether or not his definition is ultimately objectively correct is another issue, but he’s using terminology with certain connotations to describe things for which those connotations are extraneous.
Although indigenous/tribal/oral cultures may not make a linguistic or even a mental distinction between that which our culture would call “physical” and that which our culture would call “metaphysical”, our culture’s way of viewing what those i/t/o cultures describe as reality may involve the label “metaphysical”.
The thing about Abram is, from what I can see in your article, he makes the case that what our culture perceives as “metaphysical” descriptions from the i/t/o cultures is in fact physical descriptions misunderstood by *our* culture because of the way we view reality dualistically. However, what he seems to be implying is that the entire scope of animist/magical reality is actually what our culture would consider to be physical, and does not include qualities or events which our culture would consider metaphysical. This is the point I was trying to make about the non-metaphysical-animist hunter: the process of predicting the animal’s location may be mysterious and not well understood to us, but it is essentially a physical process.
And what I wanted your opinion on was the question of whether or not it is standard anthropological theory that i/t/o cultures generally describe reality as having features that our culture would say are metaphysical, like non-local information transfer, and which cannot be explained by normal physical processes.
This process does not use normal physical investigation procedures. It involves essentially a paranormal non-local non-temporal transfer of information.
Does it?
Well, for the purposes of this question, I stipulate that it does. The example I gave is open to interpretation as
Or does the hunter-gatherer simply have enough trust in his own senses that he can rely on his own subconscious, and put subliminal clues together more effectively and more quickly because he trusts his instincts?
…but essentially it is a real issue to be addressed. Not necessarily here though.
Comment by scruff — 28 August 2006 @ 9:00 PM
At the risk of being intolerably rude, I have strong doubts that this line of inquiry can bear fruit.
I am much more certain, however, that it doesn’t _have_ to bear fruit.
Consider that the question itself is incorrect.
To be precise, animinism doesn’t rely on understanding these principles of physical vs metaphysical. Animinism doesn’t even rely on the above noted abilities of communication.
What it does rely on is you approach the world. If you approach the world openly, everything else follows. If you approach it openly, this debate makes little sense.
The only faith that animinism requires is the little faith that it is at least worth interacting with the world with the entirety of your being.
Comment by jhereg — 29 August 2006 @ 9:12 AM
Also, for anyone who wants to explore the dualism in western civ more fully, I strongly recommend Pirsig’s “Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
http://bonigv.tripod.com/
Comment by jhereg — 29 August 2006 @ 9:15 AM
I don’t believe I can presume how other people understand me, or whether animals understand me. People can communicate they understand by using some sort of word/symbol we both were taught.
I can see how this animist perspective can be attractive to those who wish to see greater interdependance between living things. Yet I can only express how I can sense the world, and I would not presume how others experience it simply because we have some shared symbolism (language).
Comment by APerson — 29 August 2006 @ 9:54 AM
That’s actually an excellent example of the isolating ability of civilization.
It’s logical enough, but irrational….
You presume to know how others feel and think everyday. Have you never seen some abused? an animal? Did you not react to it?
Comment by jhereg — 29 August 2006 @ 10:33 AM
“You presume to know how others feel and think everyday.”
I doubt you have the required telepathy to know what I perceive.
I believe the words can be isolating.. as they may get in the way of direct sensation.. words judge, discriminate and contrast.
This is not a knock on language, which is a useful tool for communication. But I am hesitant to declare it as “innate”.
I can doubt, believe, and express using this coarse abstract tool. I can listen to other’s description. Yet this is far from KNOWING their experience.
I don’t know how others taste chocolate. I only know how I taste chocolate. I doubt others know how I taste chocolate.
Comment by APerson — 29 August 2006 @ 10:55 AM
BTW, the book sounds interesting, and the review above is great. I might just pick it up.
There is a such a variety of descriptions on how others contextualize their surroundings. I find most interesting. Sometimes I share such descriptions, sometimes not. But I don’t see the shared description as shared experience.
“Have you never seen some abused? an animal? Did you not react to it?”
My response to it doesn’t mean I KNOW what the animal senses. I am responding to my own senses contextualized in my particular conceptual framework.
In my framework, I don’t know anything.. I only believe and disbelieve (doubt).
Comment by APerson — 29 August 2006 @ 11:15 AM
Why do you think I need the pop culture belief of telepathy in order to know that you presume to know how others feel and think on a daily basis?
Perhaps my belief in your ability to, at _least_ presume, what others are thinking/feeling is grounded is experience.
I mean, there’s all kinds of communication that can occur before you even bring “language” into it. If you see someone kick a dog and you hear that dog yelp. What do you *think* that dog is experiencing?
If you want to understand animism, you can’t just leave it as an abstract mental construct, you *must* bring it into the real world. Go and watch, I mean *really* watch, a flock of birds for a couple hours. Do it every day. Give them your full attention.
Comment by jhereg — 29 August 2006 @ 11:19 AM
So, in other words, the metaphysical is something separate from the physical. The physical is what we experience sensually, the metaphysical is something “more,” something better, something else beyond our merely sensuous experience—something beyond the merely mechanical, physical world that animates it and gives it life, because life is not a property of the world around us. The world around us is a dead, clockwork machine, an inanimate world. So, if an animist says he talks to a rock, he can’t possibly mean that literally; he must believe there’s some metaphysical spirit that lives inside the rock, just like there’s a metaphysical spirit that lives inside the body.
Notice the dualistic assumptions here? The rock is the spirit. The spirit does not live inside the rock anymore than you live inside your body—you are your body, there is no separation!
That’s how we experience the world sensuously. It takes writing to deconstruct that, and come up with the bizarre dualism that you’re making reference to. In fact, most of us from literate civilizaton assume that to be the natural order of things, and we have a hard time imagining how it could be any other way. The real power of Abram’s work is opening your eyes to how nonsensical that assumption is.
Immanence and transcendence are concepts born from a dualistic worldview. These are fairly technical philosophical/theological terms, and your use of them suggests that you may not be entirely familiar with the centuries of argument that surround them.
This requires a radical re-definition of all the terms involved. Transcendance refers to the remoteness and separation of divinity from the physical world: divinity is beyond this world, too superlative to even be communicated with. Immanence refers to the infusion of divinity in the physical world: “G-d is all around us,” that kind of thing. The Abrahamic religions all posit a single, monotheistic deity that is simultaneously trascendant and immanent. This is a contradiction. The terms were first introduced into theology by Christian and Jewish theologians, trying to reconcile that contradiction. Most now admit that all attempts have ranged from failure to hand-waving. Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionist Judaism is unique in its honesty: since G-d cannot be both immanent and transcendant, Reconstructionists believe in an immanent, but non-transcendant, deity. Most others simply give up and classify the contradiction as a “mystery of faith.”
I disagree. I think it points to the animist origin of our beliefs, prior to the dualistic trauma of writing, before we split the world into two, separate regions: the inferior world of “flesh,” and the superior world of “spirit.” The breath is the spirit, it’s the numinous, invisible prescence that unites us all, gives us life and language and thought. It also clarifies the animist view of intelligence in the universe, since intelligence is a function of breath, spiritus, it is something we borrow from the world around us. It is created by the whole ecology we are immersed in; it is not based in our own skulls, but in the world around us.
That is certainly the way we’ve used the word, yes. We believe in a dualistic world. We start with the idea that we cannot trust our own experience; the implication of this is that the world we percieve cannot be trusted, either. So, we move the locus of meaning out of the world we percieve, into the world we cannot percieve, with postulations about the metaphysical. Plato’s version was a world of “Forms.” Christianity owed much to this tradition (see “Stoa del Sol“), though it changed the nature of this metaphysical realm, it still retained the ordering of a superior, metaphysical realm and an inferior, physical realm. The two are not entirely separate—for Plato, physical things are imperfect representations of eternal Forms, just as for Gnostics, the fleshy body is a Satanic prison that captures a divine soul—but there is a clear subordination.
It should be evident immediately that this is by no means an intuitive or natural means of viewing the world. It is much simpler, and much more immediately obvious, to place meaning within the sensuous world around us itself. This is precisely what animists do. Our traditional view of animism is largely a result of the biases of Christian missionaries, who projected Western dualism onto cultures where the concept was entirely alien. We can see the same behavior in children, even in our own culture. They talk to inanimate objects, they see faces in the clouds, they relate to the sensuous world around them, human and non-human alike, with the assumption of personhood and sanctity. We must explicitly teach them that non-human existences are less important and to be spurned. We must teach them our dualism. It does not come naturally to them; it must be taught. What comes naturally is animism.
Our culture was once animist. When we invented the notion of dualism, we needed to come up with words to denote these bizarre concepts of “metaphysics” that we’d invented. The innovators of this notion were part of an animistic culture, and so the only words they had were animistic. So yes, the term “spirit” for us no longer means breath—that’s why they’re different words—but the etymology itself reflects the history of the idea, and that we were once animists, for whom “spirit” was breath.
The case is not purely etymological, though. Abram provides examples from several oral societies, showing the primacy of breath, and how it takes the place of our notion of the “soul.”
Not if we’re understanding their beliefs in the same way they do. We certainly describe their beliefs as “metaphysical” a great deal, but this is primarily a case of projection: we don’t really understand their beliefs, so we project our beliefs onto them.
Yes, anthropologists are often very dismissive of local “superstitions.” Many of the earliest anthropologists were Christian missionaries, collecting information on what local devils had bewitched the people, so they could be properly exorcised and brought to the gospel of our Our Lord and Savior. Standard anthropological theory retains a legacy of this, and ascribes metaphysical explanations where they make little sense. Paul Radin also criticizes many of these superficial projections in Primitive Man as Philosopher. This is one of anthropology’s most serious failings, and one of the central, ongoing disputes in anthropology, to strive towards a more emic perspective.
Well said, jhereg. But don’t you think that such interaction is simply another way of saying, communication?
Thank you, APerson, for an excellent example of precisely what I was trying to illustrate. The magic of our language is so potent, it’s the only magic we use. We only ever have the experience of being ourselves; we try to communicate with others to piece together an idea of what their existence is like, but the Existentialists are right: it is always an incomplete communication.
When another human being uses language to communicate with you, you assume you have understood some amount of what he was trying to communicate, because you used language. But what about gestures, and body language? Facial expressions? Didn’t these, also, communicate to you some small part of his existence?
So, why must it only be a human conversation? We can understand bird calls, and know when they’re calling for a mate, or signalling danger. We can understand the body language of large mammals. We can understand the “language” of clouds, and tell from their movements if a storm is coming, or if they are about to clear. When we understand the language of the world around us, we can even speak it. We can make bird calls ourselves; we can do a communicative dance with other mammals and communicate as much to them by our gestures and facial expressions as they do to us.
Once we’ve admitted that communication is always imperfect, we’re free to also realize that it can still be useful, even if it is always incomplete. Then, we are also free to enter into a conversation not just with one another, but with the living world that surrounds us and sustains us.
That’s when we become animists.
It’s not. Communication is always an imperfect and incomplete attempt to share our experience. We can never do that fully, but we can approach it, and I think the attempt—doomed as it is to incompleteness—is worthwhile, because understanding something of another’s existence is better than understanding nothing of it at all.
Abram actually spends a good deal of time on this, leading into a very radical deconstruction of Cartesian dualism that I liked very much.
Well said, jhereg.
Comme