David Abram, "The Ecology of Magic," and:

• Marcia Angell, "Science in the Courtroom: Opinions without Evidence"
• Annie Dillard, "The Wreck of Time," and Ellen Dissanayake, "The Core of Art"
• Ellen Dissanayake, "The Core of Art"
  

• Jon Krakauer, "Selections from Into the Wild"

• Jan Willis, "Selections from Dreaming Me: An African-American Woman's Journey"

For more assignment ideas involving this essay, please visit the Abram link-o-mat.

The Status of Evidence in Abram and Angell

At one point in our discussions of Abram's "The Ecology of Magic," many of you made it clear that Abram had failed to make a persuasive case about the intrinsic merits of experiencing "wild nature." He obviously had his opinions about sickness and balance but, this line of response went, where was his evidence? What proof did he have beyond his own descriptions of what he had seen, heard, and felt? For this assignment, I would like to move this discussion about the value of evidence drawn from personal experience into another domain. Whereas Abram is concerned with the evidence of the senses, in this assignment we will turn our attention to the status of scientific evidence in the courtroom.

In "Science in the Courtroom: Opinions without Evidence," Marcia Angell focuses on the overeagerness of judges and lay people to accept the testimony of scientific experts in product liability cases. Angell, who is herself a medical doctor and an editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, describes the conflict that arises whenever a scientist is asked to testify in court about causation:

The question of causation is, after all, a scientific one. But scientific questions are handled very differently in the courtroom than they are outside the courtroom. The difference turns on the relationship between evidence and opinion. In both science and law, of course, "expert" opinion is important. But what that means in the two professions is as far apart as day and night (116).

Because the courtroom isn't a laboratory and the people on the jury aren't scientists, the rules that govern the scientific community are altered in ways that Angell finds troubling.

For this assignment, I would like for you to write a speculative essay on the causes and consequences of the conflict Angell describes. That is, how many different understandings of evidence are at play in a courtroom when a scientific expert testifies? Whose understanding governs the outcome of the cases Angell discusses? Whose understanding do you think should have governed the outcome of the cases Angell discusses? What do you think would have happened if the prosecution in the breast implant case had called Abram to testify? What if the defense had? What if he--or someone like him--had served on the jury?

Back to top

Abram and Dissanayake: "Making Special" and "Magic"

Ellen Dissanayake and David Abram both write about the ways that modern Western culture has separated human beings from ways of understanding or relating to their environment. Both offer suggestions for recovering that understanding. Dissanayake uses the term "making special" to describe what she calls a "core tendency" in human beings related to play and ritual. Abram offers "magic," which he first defines as "the ability or power to alter one's consciousness at will," but then complicates that definition by showing how magic functions in "tribal societies" to connect humans to "the multiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the local landscape." In this assignment, I want you to write an essay in which you discuss how Dissanyake's idea of "making special" might contradict, complement, and complicate Abram's hopes for "magic." How does Dissanayake limit or expand Abram's critique of the "reduction of the animal (and the earth) to an object"? How do the authors incorporate ideas and examples from nonwestern cultures into their arguments?

As with your earlier assignment, you should quote and analyze specific passages (at least two from each text) from the assigned texts and you should make connections among those passages. To write a successful paper, the passages you choose to quote and the argument you make should develop as a dialectic. Strong papers should have sustained moments of close analysis (like the ones we have been producing in class) that pay particular attention to how language is used in a passage in ways that extend or complicate your argument.

Rob Nelson, Fall 2000

Back to top

Abram, Dillard, and Dissanayake: The Place of Human Community

On first reading David Abram's "The Ecology of Magic," one may be tempted to dismiss him as some "New Age" guru, hawking mysticism to the gullible masses. For his part, Abram distinguishes himself from those in the West who turn to shamanism in hopes of learning more about "personal insight and curing" (21). Abram goes on to write:

These are noble aims, to be sure, yet they are secondary to, and derivative from, the primary role of the indigenous shaman, a role that cannot be fulfilled without long and sustained exposure to wild nature, to its patterns and vicissitudes. Mimicking the indigenous shaman's curative methods without his intimate knowledge of the wider natural community cannot, if I am correct, do anything more than trade certain symptoms for others, or shift the locus of dis-ease from place to place within the human community. For the source of stress lies in the relation between the human community and the natural landscape (original emphasis, 21).

What does Abram mean when he alludes to "the relation between the human community and the natural landscape"? Where does the shaman fit into this relation? What is his "intimate knowledge of the wider natural community"? And, since Abram rules out "mimicking the indigenous shaman's curative methods," what would Abram have those who are interested in escaping the "stress" of modern life do?

After you've read Abram's essay and considered these questions, I would like you to write an essay that discusses how "the relation between the human community and the natural landscape" is understood in the writings we've read by Dillard, Dissanayake, and Abram. How do these authors characterize this relation? What forces are responsible for creating it? What forces cause this relation to be disrupted, distorted, destroyed? What relation do the authors feel is ideal? What, if any, purpose does this relation serve? And, of what use is it to write about such matters?

Back to top

Abram and Krakauer: Shamanism and the Excursion into the Wild

In Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer attempts "to make sense of [Chris] McCandless's life and death, yet his essence remains slippery, vague, elusive" (439). For this paper, I want you to discuss how Abram's notion of the shaman helps to make sense of McCandless's story.

You may want to consider some of the following questions. As always, this is not a checklist of things to include in your paper, but rather a list of possible jumping-off points to help you get started towards a thesis of your own.

1. Did McCandless see himself as a shaman-like figure? Does Krakauer? Do you?

2. Does it make sense to see Krakauer himself, rather than McCandless, as a shaman?

3. How would Abram regard McCandless's actions?

4. Would Krakauer be as impressed with Abram's adventures as he is with McCandless's?

5. Does anything in Abram's essay help to account for the harshness of McCandless's critics?

6. Does McCandless's fate prove anything about the problems with the Western attitude to nature that Abram describes?

Craig Eliason, Fall 2000

Back to top

Abram and Willis: The Paths to Enlightenment

In "The Ecology of Magic," David Abram argues with great conviction that the deep sense of connection with the world achieved by Balians and shamans cannot be achieved "without long and sustained exposure to wild nature, its patterns and its vicissitudes." Western healers who try to assume the mantle of the shaman "without [an] intimate knowledge of the wider natural community cannot. . . do anything more than trade certain symptoms for others." Judging from your reading of Willis and Abram, is the experience of the Balian or the shaman the same as the experience of the Tibetan meditator? Does an "intimate knowledge" of the "wider" world always assume the same form? Would Abram say that Tibetan meditation brings people closer to nature? Would Willis accept Abram's experience as a form of enlightenment?

Back to top