Geology Reference
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its own sounds, smells, and tastes—is entirely a part of the sensuous landscape it per-
ceives. Hence, to touch the coarse skin of an oak tree with one's fingers is also, at the
same moment, to experience one's own tactility, to feel oneself touched
by
the tree. Sim-
ilarly, to gaze out at a forested hillside is also to feel one's own visibility, and so to feel
oneself exposed to that hillside—to feel oneself
seen by
those trees. Whenever we ex-
perience ourselves not as disembodied minds, but as the very palpable, sensitive, and
sentient organisms that we are, we cannot help but notice this curious reciprocity in our
sensory experience: to perceive the world is also to feel the world perceiving us.
Abram's analysis of the mutual, participatory nature of sensory perception goes a
long way toward helping us understand the near universality of animistic experience
among indigenous, oral peoples. Here is an anthropologist Richard Nelson's brief de-
scription of the Koyukon tribe of central Alaska:
Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes. A person moving through
nature—however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be—is never truly alone. The surroundings
are aware, sensate, personified. They feel. They can be offended. And they must, at every moment, be
treated with the proper respect.
From the opposite side of the planet, the great South African writer and explorer Laurens
van der Post reports a striking example of the same mode of perception among the San
people of the Kalahari desert. Far from the campfire an elder is instructing a younger
member of his tribe:
You may think that deep in the darkness and the density of the bush you are alone and unobserved, but
that, Little Cousin, would be an illusion of the most dangerous kind. One is never alone in the bush. One
is never unobserved. One is always known. It is true there are many parts of the bush where no human
eye might be able to penetrate but there is always, like some spy of God himself, an eye upon you, even
if it is only the eye of some animal, bird, reptile or little insect. . . . And besides the eyes—and do not
underrate them—there are the tendrils of the plants, the grasses, the leaves of the trees and the roots of
all growing things, which lead the warmth of the sun deep down into the darkest and coldest recesses of
the earth, to quicken them with new life. They too shake with the shock of our feet and vibrate to the
measure of our tread and I am certain that they have their own ways of registering what we bring or take
from the life for which they are a home. Often as I have seen how a blade of grass will suddenly shiver
on a windless day at my approach or the leaves of trees tremble, I have thought that they too must have
a heart beating within them and that my coming has quickened their pulse with apprehension until I can
note the alarm vibrating at their delicate wrists and their high, translucid temples.
Indeed, the discourse of virtually all oral, indigenous peoples supports Abram's claim
that “in the untamed world of direct sensory experience
no
phenomenon presents itself
as utterly passive or inert. To the sensing body
all
phenomena are animate, actively so-
liciting the participation of our senses, or else withdrawing from our focus and repelling
our involvement. Things disclose themselves to our immediate perception as vectors,
as styles of unfolding—not as finished chunks of matter given once and for all, but as
