David Abram

David Abram
Abram in 2018
Born (1957-06-24) June 24, 1957 (age 67)
Nassau County, New York, U.S.
EducationWesleyan University
Yale School of Forestry
SUNY at Stony Brook
Notable work
  • The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World.
  • Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology.
Awardsinternational Lannan Literary Award for Non-Fiction
RegionContinental Philosophy, Ecological Philosophy
School
InstitutionsSchumacher College, University of Oslo, Harvard University
Notable ideas
  • The More-than-Human World.
  • Environmental effects of orality and literacy.
  • Sensorial perception as inherently animistic.
  • Climate as "the commonwealth of breath."
  • The Humilocene.

David Abram is an American ecologist and philosopher best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues.[1][2] He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology[3] (2010) and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (1996), for which he received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.[4] Abram is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE);[5] his essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared often in such journals as the online magazine Emergence, Orion, Environmental Ethics, Parabola, Tikkun and The Ecologist, as well as in numerous academic anthologies.[6]

In 1996 Abram coined the phrase "the more-than-human world" as a way of referring to earthly nature (introducing it in the subtitle of The Spell of the Sensuous and throughout the text of that book); the term was gradually adopted by other scholars, theorists, and activists, and has become a key phrase within the lingua franca of the broad ecological movement.[7] In recent writings, Abram sometimes refers to the more-than-human world as "the commonwealth of breath."[8]

Abram was the first contemporary philosopher to advocate a reappraisal of "animism" as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview — one which roots human cognition in the sensitive and sentient human body, while affirming the ongoing entanglement of our bodily experience with the uncanny sentience of other animals (each of which encounters the same world that we perceive yet from an outrageously different angle and perspective).[9] A close student of the traditional ecological knowledge systems of diverse indigenous peoples, Abram articulates the entwinement of human subjectivity not only with other animals but with the varied sensitivities of the many plants upon which humans depend, as well as our cognitive entanglement with the collective sensitivity and sentience of the particular earthly places — the bioregions (or ecosystems) — that surround and sustain our communities. In recent years his work has come to be closely associated both with the "new animism," and with a broad movement loosely termed "New Materialism," due to Abram's espousal of a radically transformed sense of matter and materiality.[10]

Abram is currently senior visiting scholar in ecology and natural philosophy at Harvard Divinity School.[11]

  1. ^ "Fellowships in Environmental Journalism". Middlebury College.
  2. ^ "IONS Directory Profile". Institute of Noetic Sciences. Archived from the original on 2013-02-04. Retrieved 2013-04-04.
  3. ^ "Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology By David Abram". penguinrandomhouse.com. Retrieved August 6, 2020.
  4. ^ "The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World By David Abram". penguinrandomhouse.com. Retrieved August 6, 2020.
  5. ^ "David Abram". Alliance for Wild Ethics. 30 November 2015. Retrieved August 6, 2020.
  6. ^ See the papers and essays by Abram published on Academia.edu.
  7. ^ See, for example, its use within many papers in the Journal of Environmental Humanities, or the centrality of the phrase for recent textbooks such as Ecological Ethics: An Introduction by Patrick Curry (Polity, 2011) or Invisible Nature: Healing the Destructive Divide between People and the Environment, by Kenneth Worthy (Prometheus Books, 2013), or many more recent works like Being Salmon, Being Human by Martin Lee Mueller (Chelsea Green, 2017), Kabbalah and Ecology: God's Image In The More-Than-Human World by David Mevoroch Seidenberg (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Being Together in Place: Indigenous Coexistence in a More Than Human World by Soren C. Larsen and Jay T. Johnson (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds edited by Michelle Bastian, Owain Jones, et al. (Routledge, 2016), "Locative Texts for Sensing the More–Than–Human" by Alinta Krauth (Electronic Book Review: Digital Futures of Literature, Theory, Criticism, and the Arts; May 2020) and innumerable other papers and books, "Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity" edited by Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor (Routledge, 2020).
  8. ^ See Abram's afterword for Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Indiana University Press, 2014)
  9. ^ Abram, David (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Vintage Books / Random House. pp. 63–85.
  10. ^ See, for example Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Indiana University Press, 2014), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)
  11. ^ "Current Affiliates". Center for the Study of World Religions. Retrieved October 5, 2022.