Living the Theory

Naturalism and animism in Nastassja Martin’s Croire aux fauves

Abstract

This article presents an account of the Anthropocene, describing it as the age of catastrophes and the intrusion of Gaia, following the ideas of Isabelle Stengers. Next, it discusses the limitations that contemporary literary works display regarding the ecological issues of the Anthropocene, according to Amitav Ghosh, who claims that the recent literature conceals the ecological disasters and the political challenges resulting from global warming and its consequences. That said, the article aims to show how Croire aux Fauves, a book by the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin, can be seen as a text that succeeds as a literature that reflects upon the Anthropocene using the autobiographical narrative and its theoretical positions on the even, an indigenous group of people who lives in the Russian Arctic. Considering the truthful core episode in the book in which a bear attacks the author at the Kamtchátka mountains, the article asserts that the book structures a hybrid composition of autobiographical novel and scientific report on one hand and of tragic novel and speculative literature on the other. Finally, this study links the hybrid composition of the book with Philippe Descola’s dualism naturalism/animism to evince how the fluctuation between these two forms of thinking limits the notion that the bear attack can be seen as only an accident and a tragedy according to the naturalistic perspective. At the same time, this fluctuation enables an animistic interpretation of the event through what Martin calls animist pragmatics.