ABSTRACT
In February 2012, American philosopher and cultural ecologist David Abram was a guest speaker at my university and gave an inspiring lecture about the interrelation of embodiment, nature, and spirituality. 1 Abram explained that air as a natural element is associated in many Indigenous, oral cultures with an embodied consciousness or awareness that permeates the human body through breathing and creates a continuity between the inside and the outside. He referred to the Inuit word sila, which shares some of the characteristics of the Hindu term prana since it refers to air and wind, and conveys the continuous circulation of the life force that animates the world through a never-ending and ever-changing flux. He inferred that in traditionally oral cultures the unseen atmosphere, by virtue of its invisibility, is often experienced as the most sacred dimension of the sensuous cosmos. He noted that, in the southwest desert, for the Hopi and the other Puebloan peoples, the breath is sometimes considered a person’s spirit essence, and that the kachinas, or spirit ancestors, regularly take the form of rain-bearing clouds to visit the land of the living. He honored the inexhaustible complexity and coherence of such traditional worldviews, stressing that for many Indigenous epistemologies, air is an invisible but nonetheless palpable mystery, and hence that singing (and indeed speaking) is a way of influencing and being influenced by the invisible, through the resonance of the sounding body; in traditional oral cultures the power of the human voice is linked to its ability to transform the texture of air, which is what speaks through us when we speak.
