Sophie Pinkham skriver om franske antropologen Nastassja Martin. Två av den senares böcker finns på engelska: In the Eye of the Wild (2021; urspr. 2019) och East of Dreams (2026; urspr. 2022). I den första boken berättar Martin om sina fältstudier hos ursprungsbefolkningen på Kamchatka-halvön, bland annat om hennes nära-döden-upplevelse med en björn:
It recounts Martin’s near-fatal fight with a bear in Kamchatka. She survived by stabbing the animal in the leg with an ice axe, but lost part of her jaw and suffered severe scarring. After a harrowing series of operations in a Russian military hospital and then in France, she returned to Kamchatka as soon as she was physically able. There she rejoined her adopted family of Even people, who had returned to the forest after the collapse of the USSR; the daughter of the family smuggled Martin through a military checkpoint in the trunk of her car.
Den andra boken "doubles as an anthropological manifesto for the age of climate crisis" och Pinkham lyfter fram hur Martins naivitet gör henne blind inför Even-folkets materiella förutsättningar när hon hellre fokuserar på deras animism och symboliska flykt in i skogen undan klimatkrisen:
She is perplexed by the resistance of Daria’s son Ivan and his cousin when she insists on accompanying them on a fishing trip one day. The reason soon becomes clear: she watches them catch a huge number of salmon, slice out all the roe for sale on the black market and leave the bodies on the forest floor to rot. The fish heads do not point east; there is no ceremony to honour their souls. Ivan and his cousin need cash. The fact that the Even routinely hide or lie about their fishing and hunting to the authorities, which impose unrealistically low hunting quotas, comes as a revelation to Martin, even though the navigation of corrupt bureaucracy and unfollowable rules is a fixture of contemporary Russian life, as it was of Soviet life and of imperial Russian life before it. It is painful to watch her question Ivan and the other men until they grudgingly admit that they lied on their paperwork, or that the area’s animals are disappearing thanks to uncontrolled poaching – including their own.