David Abram - Biography

Biography

Born on Long Island, Abram grew up among the marshes and creeks that wind through coastal suburbia. David's mother is a performing concert pianist. He began practicing sleight-of-hand magic during his high school years in Baldwin, which sparked his ongoing fascination with perception. In 1976, he began working as "house magician" at Alice's Restaurant in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, and soon was performing at clubs throughout New England while studying at Wesleyan University. He took a year off from college to journey as a street magician through Europe and the Middle East; toward the end of that journey, in London, he began exploring the application of sleight-of-hand magic to psychotherapy under the guidance of Dr. R. D. Laing. After graduating summa cum laude from Wesleyan in 1980, Abram traveled throughout Southeast Asia, living and studying with traditional, indigenous magic practitioners in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Nepal. When he returned to North America he became a student of natural history and ecology while continuing to perform in Canada and the United States. A much-reprinted essay written while studying at the Yale School of Forestry in 1984 — entitled "The Perceptual Implications of Gaia" — brought Abram into association with the scientists formulating the Gaia Hypothesis, and he was soon lecturing in tandem with biologist Lynn Margulis and geochemist James Lovelock in Britain and the United States. In the late 1980s, Abram turned his attention to exploring and articulating the decisive influence of language upon the human senses and upon our sensory experience of the land around us. Abram received a doctorate for this work from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in 1993.