East of Dreams - by Nastassja Martin (Paperback)

About the Book

"After working in Alaska with the Gwich'in people, Nastassja Martin crossed the Bering Strait to begin comparative research in Kamchatka. During the Soviet era, the Even, a nomadic reindeer herding people, were settled on collective farms. After the fall of the regime, many continued to herd reindeer that no longer belonged to them, the herds being in the hands of private companies. Since the opening of the region in 1991, the former kolkhozes of Kamchatka have been transformed into tourist platforms. In 1989, just before the fall of the Soviet Union, an Even family reportedly decided to return to the forest, to recreate an autonomous way of life based on hunting, fishing and gathering. Was it a legend? How did a small collective, abused, dispossessed, and enslaved by the colonists before being forgotten by the great history, seize the systemic crisis to regain its autonomy? How did it manage to reconnect the tenuous threads of the daily dialogue that linked it to animals and elements, without the help of the shamans eliminated by the colonial process? What ways of life did the Even of Icha reinvent, to continue to exist in a world rapidly transformed by the battering rams of extractivism and climate change? In this book, where performative dreams and mythical stories respond to assimilation policies as well as to the disruption of ecosystems, the author brings colonial history and indigenous cosmologies into dialogue by restoring their power to the multiple voices that give the world its vitality"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Displaced after the fall of the Soviet Union, an indigenous family works to reclaim their former self-sufficient way of life in this lyrical work of anthropology and colonial Russian history.

The work of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin has taken her to Alaska, where she worked with the indigenous Gwich'in people, and across the Bering Strait to Kamchatka, where she lived and studied among the Even community. Both regions, both peoples, had been on the front line of the Cold War and in its aftermath were placed in a new and anomalous relation to government authority. These vast and remote areas, long treated as colonies, now found themselves newly neglected and newly free. The family of the Even matriarch Daria, for example, known to readers of Martin's earlier book In the Eye of the Wild, decided to leave behind the urban existence enforced upon them in the Soviet period and return to the Icha forest to lead a self-sufficient life based on hunting, fishing, and gathering.

The end of the Cold War brought the beginning of a new era in which the effects of global warming have proved ever more destructive. East of Dreams, like In the Eye of the Wild, mixes memoir and ethnography, as Martin looks at how indigenous peoples continue to take the measure of massive ongoing change. She also looks to them for new ways of understanding the relations between humankind, the human mind, and the larger world of nature, seen to exist on a vital continuum. East of Dreams offers a radical anthropological epistemology for our troubled times.

Review Quotes

"In East of Dreams, Nastassja Martin offers readers a literary pleasure and poses one of the major political questions of our time, reexamining colonialism and the foreseeable as well as clear-and-present consequences of climate change: Does the notion of 'capitalism' encompass all aspects of modernity?" --Marc Lebiez, En attendant Nadeau

"Nastassja Martin's East of Dreams brings Claude Lévi-Strauss's masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques, immediately to mind." --Pascal Ruffenach, La Croix

About the Author

Nastassja Martin is a French author and anthropologist who has studied the Gwich'in people of Alaska and the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Her books include In the Eye of the Wild (available from New York Review Books), Les Ames sauvages: Face à l'Occident, la résistance d'un peuple d'Alaska (winner of the Prix Louis Castex of the Académie Française), and, most recently, Lamont des sources. In 2023 she became professor of Habitabilité de la Terre et transitions justes at the University of Paris 1/Sorbonne, and she is the director of Tvaian, a documentary based on the experiences of Daria, one of the subjects of East of Dreams.

Sophie R. Lewis is an editor and a translator from the French and Portuguese. Her translation of Noémi Lefebvre's Blue Self-Portrait was short-listed for both the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2018, and her translation of Nastassja Martin's In the Eye of the Wild was a winner of the nonfiction translation prize from the French-American Foundation in 2022.