The Spell of the Sensuous

This is a wide ranging philosophical analysis of humans, and how we engage with/make sense of the world. Much of it will be familiar to readers of Merleau-Ponty, but his background as an anthropologist and naturalist allows him to bring a unique perspective on this. And for people who are not familiar with phenomenology, he provides one of the better introductions that I've read.

The most powerful parts of the book are where he draws upon his anthropological background, to make some interesting arguments about how 'civilized' humans perceive the world very differently from our indigenous ancestors, due to things like their need to pay more attention to landmarks and the behavior of animals. And he makes some very novel (to me at least - this may be common place for anthropologists) arguments about how indigenous myths are really a form of memory palace (c.f. Francis Yates), rather than stories in the way that we think of them. Ways for a culture to pass on remember cultural knowledge about the land, traditions, praxis and moral precepts. He also makes some interesting arguments about how written language changed how human beings thought and interacted with the world.

Unfortunately while his arguments are fascinating and highly original, many of them rely upon dated (or in some cases) questionable sources. In particular his analysis of Amazonian tribes relies heavily on a very questionable memoir by a Brazilian medicine man, that most anthropologists believe to have been largely made up. Some of his other arguments rely upon anthropological texts from the 70s and 80s, suggesting that his knowledge of the field probably ended when he completed his graduate studies. So I'm not sure how reliable a guide he truly is.

Despite these reservations, this book is well worth reading. It will challenge your assumptions, and may provoke you to look at the world differently.

A good book to read in addition to this would be Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk.

I read this because it informed Jenny Odell's wonderful talk how to do nothing.

I got a pretty distasteful primitivist, psuedosciency vibe from lots of it. But setting that aside I think there's still a lot of interesting stuff in here. Abram dives deep into the effects of language, especially phonetically written language, on how we abstract the world around us. To me the valuable thing is the act of investigating language and other tools for abstraction, as opposed to the specific analysis & evidence he gives for his points. Peripherally there's also lots of fun stuff about the reciprocity of perception and the conceptual barriers between the senses.

I can definitely see how this book can read as anti-progress, anti-abstraction, or anti-civilization. However if you take him at his word that it is not these things maybe you'll have a better time with the book. In my view he is arguing that we are living too much in our own constructed worlds, but that the way forward is not to reject abstraction but to learn to have it coexist with direct sensory perception.

If I were to read it again, or recommend someone else read it, I would say the beginning and end are quite good but the middle is eminently skimmable, filled with kind of cringey Noble Savage stuff. All the points he makes in the middle get summarized at the beginning and the end anyways.