"The telling of stories, like singing and praying,……" — David Abram
"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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David Abram
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25 Quotes by David Abram
David Abram has 25 quotes on this site.
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Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.
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Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to…
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A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the…
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Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of…
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No event for the Koyukon - or for most other indigenous peoples - is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but…
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Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to…
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For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous…
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In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken…
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Does the human intellect, or "reason," really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation…
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We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.
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Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils-all are gates where our body receives…
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As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly “inert” letters on…
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