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The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World

Book by David Abram · 5 quotes · Humans, Abram, Language

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The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World Quotes

“A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.”

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Book:The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World
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“The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.”

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Book:The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World
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“For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.”

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Book:The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World
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