participatory perception
The understanding that perception is not a one-way extraction of data from a passive world but a reciprocal exchange between the sensing body and the sensuous terrain. To see is to be seen. To touch is to be touched. The world is not observed; it is participated in. Abram argues this is the baseline mode of perception for oral, indigenous cultures โ and was once for all of us.
Etymology
Term developed by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty.
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