East of Dreams

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.