Editing Animism (section)

=== Ethical and ecological understanding ===
Cultural ecologist and philosopher [[David Abram]] proposed an ethical and ecological understanding of animism, grounded in the [[Phenomenology (psychology)|phenomenology]] of sensory experience. In his books ''The Spell of the Sensuous'' and ''Becoming Animal,'' Abram suggests that material things are never entirely passive in our direct perceptual experience, holding rather that perceived things actively "solicit our attention" or "call our focus", coaxing the perceiving body into an ongoing participation with those things.{{sfn|Abram|1996}}{{sfn|Abram|2010}}

In the absence of intervening technologies, he suggests that [[sensory experience]] is inherently animistic in that it discloses a material field that is animate and self-organizing from the beginning. [[David Abram]] used contemporary [[Cognitive science|cognitive]] and [[natural science]], as well as the perspectival worldviews of diverse indigenous oral cultures, to propose a richly [[Pluralism (philosophy)|pluralist]] and story-based cosmology in which matter is alive. He suggested that such a relational [[ontology]] is in close accord with humanity's spontaneous perceptual experience by drawing attention to the senses, and to the primacy of sensuous terrain, enjoining a more respectful and ethical relation to the more-than-human community of animals, plants, soils, mountains, waters, and weather-patterns that materially sustains humanity.{{sfn|Abram|1996}}{{sfn|Abram|2010}}

In contrast to a long-standing tendency in the Western social sciences, which commonly provide rational explanations of animistic experience, Abram develops an animistic account of reason itself. He holds that civilised reason is sustained only by intensely animistic participation between human beings and their own written signs. For instance, as soon as someone reads letters on a page or screen, they can "see what it says"—the letters speak as much as nature spoke to pre-literate peoples. Reading can usefully be understood as an intensely concentrated form of animism, one that effectively eclipses all of the other, older, more spontaneous forms of animistic participation in which humans were once engaged.

{{blockquote|To tell the story in this manner—to provide an animistic account of reason, rather than the other way around—is to imply that animism is the wider and more inclusive term and that oral, mimetic modes of experience still underlie, and support, all our literate and technological modes of reflection. When reflection's rootedness in such bodily, participatory modes of experience is entirely unacknowledged or unconscious, reflective reason becomes dysfunctional, unintentionally destroying the corporeal, sensuous world that sustains it.{{sfn|Abram|1996|p=[https://archive.org/details/spellofsensuousp00abra_0/page/303 303]}} }}