CRASSH | Magic and Ecology: Entangled Life I David Abram and Merlin Sheldrake

A conversation with David Abram and Merlin Sheldrake in response to Merlin's new book, 'Entangled Life' (Penguin, 2020). This talk is part of the Magic and Ecology online seminar series. Join us for the live panel with David and Merlin on 9 April 2021, 6pm GMT/1pm EST, chaired by Dr Alice Tarbuck.

David Abram’s seminal The Spell of the Sensuous (1997) argued that disdain for magic produced, in the West, a distorted rather than enlightened sense of the non-human world.
Merlin Sheldrake’s recent work explores what Abram calls the 'more-than-human' quality of nonhuman presences, and together David and Merlin examine what it means to live 'humanly' in a more-than-human world of entangled lifeforms.

Speaker Biographies:
Dr David Abram
David Abram is a cultural ecologist, philosopher and sleight-of-hand magician whose influential work, The Spell of the Sensuous: Language and Perception in a More-than-human World (1997), demonstrated the parallels between animism and eco-phenomenology and brought non-Western ontologies into dialogue with Western metaphysics. Abram is especially interested in language and has done important work on the ethics of speech and how it relates to the environment of things named. Abram holds a PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and is Founder and Creative Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics: https://wildethics.org.

Dr Merlin Sheldrake
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. He received a PhD in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Merlin’s is a keen brewer and fermenter, and is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. Find out more at merlinsheldrake.com.

Chair: Alice Tarbuck is a poet and academic based in Edinburgh. Alice is the author of 'A Spell in the Wild: A Year and Six Centuries of Magic' (2020).

The full Magic and Ecology Programme can be found at http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/29231.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed on this recording of a CRASSH event belong solely to the presenters and do not necessarily represent the views of CRASSH or the University of Cambridge.