David Abram, "The Ecology of Magic"

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:

1. David Abram's essay begins with a description of his travels in eastern Bali and ends with his return to the United States. What happens to Abram during the course of his travels? When he says, "I began to see and to hear in a manner I never had before," what does he mean?  

2. Abram tells us that one cannot become a shaman without "long and sustained exposure to wild nature, to its patterns and vicissitudes." What is "wild nature"? How does it differ from the kinds of nature one finds in a city, a suburb, or a state park? How does Abram's experience of "wild nature" differ from the experience one might have in each of these places?  

3. As Abram reflects on the differences between how he felt when he was in Indonesia and how he felt on his return to the United States, he considers the possibility that Westerners might have "a real inability to clearly see, or focus upon, anything outside the realm of human technology, or to hear as meaningful anything other than human speech." What is it that Abram would like for us to focus on instead?  

Questions for Writing:  

1. In "The Ecology of Magic," Abram describes how his travels made him "a student of subtle differences." What does it mean to become such a student? What does one notice? And why is it important to notice such things?  

2. As Abram sees it, there is a qualitative difference between the ways Westerners experience nature and the ways shamans experience nature. And yet, somehow, Abram himself was able to transcend the difference and access these other ways of feeling. What made it possible for Abram to do this? Could anyone have the experiences Abram describes?  

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:  

1. In "The Mind's Eye," Oliver Sacks asks, "to what extent are we-our experiences, our reactions-shaped, predetermined, by our brains, and to what extent do we shape our own brains?" By phrasing the question in this way, Sacks asks us to consider "to what extent" the brain shapes experience and experience shapes the brain. Drawing on Abram's discussion of sensuous experience and shamanism for your examples, respond to Sacks's question. Is the relationship between the shaping power of the brain and the power of personal experience one of relative equality? Is the brain itself largely responsible for who we are and how we experience the world, or is sensuous experience more decisive?  

2. Abram defines humanity in the following way: “We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”  Gregory Stock, in arguing for self-selected human enhancement, makes the following prediction: “As we consciously transform ourselves, we will become no less human than we became tens of thousands of years ago when we embarked up a course of self-domestication and began, quite unconsciously, to self-select for the human qualities that enable us to live and work together effectively.” How do you imagine that humanity will be defined in the future? In concrete terms, discuss how the idea of humanity might be transformed if the course of human history follows the divergent paths described by Abram and Stock.

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