David Abram, "The Ecology of Magic," and:

• Jon Krakauer, "Selections from Into the Wild"

• Michael Pollan, "Playing God in the Garden" and Gregory Stock, "The Enhanced and the Unenhanced"

For more assignment ideas involving this essay, please visit the Abram link-o-mat.

Abram and Krakauer: Shamanism and the Excursion into the Wild

In Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer attempts "to make sense of [Chris] McCandless's life and death, yet his essence remains slippery, vague, elusive" (439). For this paper, I want you to discuss how Abram's notion of the shaman helps to make sense of McCandless's story.

You may want to consider some of the following questions. As always, this is not a checklist of things to include in your paper, but rather a list of possible jumping-off points to help you get started towards a thesis of your own.

1. Did McCandless see himself as a shaman-like figure? Does Krakauer? Do you?

2. Does it make sense to see Krakauer himself, rather than McCandless, as a shaman?

3. How would Abram regard McCandless's actions?

4. Would Krakauer be as impressed with Abram's adventures as he is with McCandless's?

5. Does anything in Abram's essay help to account for the harshness of McCandless's critics?

6. Does McCandless's fate prove anything about the problems with the Western attitude to nature that Abram describes?

Craig Eliason, Fall 2000

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Abram, Pollan & Stock: Changing Worlds

David Abram writes an anthropological analysis of The Ecology of Magic. In some ways Abram is critical of Western attitudes and behavior toward the world. One might conclude that he is, among other things, writing about moving between worlds, for he writes about the process of moving between A cultures @ and recognizes the need to move between A the temporal structure that it bounds(as it) is about to dissolve, or metamorphose, into something else. @ Michael Pollan and Gregory Stock also paint the portrait of a vastly changing world, albeit from a different perspective, but it is, nevertheless, a vastly changing world.

How would you reconcile these worlds, or would you? How does knowledge play an important role for each author, or does it? How can both worlds co-exist, or should they? What might one world learn from the other? Write an essay that looks at the basic question of how we know what we know in relation to any of the above questions, or one that you personally find compelling.

Paul Herman, Fall 2005

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