David Abram

The Spell of the Sensuous argues that written language, and the alphabet in particular, cut Western perception loose from the living world it grew up inside, and that the loss is the root of the ecological trouble rather than a symptom of it. David Abram builds the case from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on one side and from time spent with traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal on the other. Pantheon published it in 1996 and it took a Lannan Literary Award. He is a sleight-of-hand magician by early trade, and that is where the fieldwork began, and the phrase he coined for what he is describing, the more-than-human world, has since passed into common use in environmental writing. Anthropologists have pushed back on how far his examples generalise. Becoming Animal followed in 2010.