In the Eye of the Wild

August 2015. Kamchatka. Anthropologist Nastassja Martin is attacked by a bear while on a research trip. He survives the attack with a serious jaw injury. A wounded bear, struck by an ice pick, flees back into the wild.

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With this event begins the healing process, about the first year of which Nastassja testifies in the autobiographical prose Believing in Beasts. In it, he describes the healing of the wound, but also of his world, fragmented between the volcanic landscape of Kamchatka and the so-called “Western civilization”. The extraordinarily candid record of inner struggle is a defense of vulnerability as an important premise of understanding and an exploration of where the boundaries of “human” lie.

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Distant homes and different interpretations of events. The surreal world of Russian healthcare and the sterility of Western hospitals. Therapy. Staying with her mother and reconnecting with Eveny. To understand the clash with the beast, Nastassja must establish a dialogue with his loved ones, his subconscious, and also with the landscape of the bear. In the light of all its worlds, it is irreversibly contaminated.

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The process of coping with a traumatic experience is not just a physical convalescence. Nastassja's body becomes a field for politics, a place of unlikely encounters. On her jaw, Western Surgery conducts a dialogue with a Siberian bear. Nastassya is undergoing a test of trust towards the Russian implant as well as towards Western psychological care. A face marked by another, changed beyond recognition, opens the way to inner transformation and the search for interspace. How to translate the experience of transformative conflict with otherness into native language and context? What are the boundaries between anthropological research and everyday identities and relationships?

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The French anthropologist and writer Nastassja Martin (1986) focuses on Nordic cultures in her research work, having resided in Alaska and Kamchatka, for example. It deals with the translation between the thinking and perception of the Western world and the animistic practice of peoples living in direct dependence on their surroundings. “When the electricity disappeared, the ghost world returned,” is how Nastassy's Eve friend Darya describes the collapse of the Soviet Union in Believing the Beast. Martin considers his practice interdisciplinarily. As an anthropologist, she does not consider herself an impartial bearer of “objectivity” and considers the mission of anthropology to give voice to different ways of being in the world and to show their political content.

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The project is implemented with the financial participation of the EU through the National Recovery Plan and the Ministry of Culture.