PRIMORDIAL RESOURCES ~ WILD ENCOUNTERS

THE EYE OF THE CROCODILE

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The late Val Plumwood was a feminist writer and scholar, the author of three books and over 80 published papers. Her major books, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, and Environmental Culture: The Crisis of Reason published by Routledge, London, in December 1993, were major contributions to feminist and environmental philosophy. Having deliberated profoundly on her experience of surviving a crocodile attack in February 1985 in Australia’s magnificent Kakadu National Park (the setting of Crocodile Dundee, filmed there a few months after the attack), Val Plumwood was equipped to write an account which is much more than an adventure story, one which addresses the meaning of our lives and major philosophical issues of our time. Unfortunately this account was unfinished at the time of her death and The Eye of the Crocodile combines the three completed chapters of this book with earlier writings on the themes of animals, death and predation.

Val understood the crocodile as it was seen in both Indigenous Australian and ancient Egyptian narrative, as a trickster figure, a deliverer of judgement on the errant human. In biblical metaphor, the crocodile delivers adverse judgement on human pretensions to master a malleable world. The crocodile is now one of the last remaining major predators of human beings, a creature which perceives us not in the inflated terms in which we tend to view ourselves, as cyber-masters or techno-gods transcending the merely animal realm, but simply as another palatable item of food. Crocodile predation on humans still has a unique ability to recall to us something uncomfortable and unflattering about who we are, to teach a lesson from the past we forget at our peril about the unconquerability of the world we think we master.

These opening tense chapters are a story of struggle and survival set in the powerful landscape of Australia’s Top End. As a feminist writer and environmental philosopher Val Plumwood looked into the eye of the crocodile and reflected on the meaning of her experience of being crocodile prey. This was an experience which changed her view of selfhood, human life and human freedom. The master story of Western culture places at the centre of the human story an invulnerable, heroic rational consciousness, struggling to reduce the energy, excess and otherness of nature to a humanised and moralised order which will do his bidding and reflect back his own conception of his deserts. Val Plumwood shows how the crocodile as trickster can help us reshape the old human-centred master narrative into a more modest tale appropriate for new times.

Few people have survived three death rolls from the Saltwater Crocodile, perhaps the most formidable remaining predator of humans, and lived to tell the tale.  The Eye of the Crocodile is not only a survival tale, but a unique reflection on the meaning of human identity, human struggle and human death from a narrator who was also a major environmental philosopher. 
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Part of the feast
The life and work of Val Plumwood

National Museum of Australia
A celebration of the life and legacy of Australian environmental philosopher Val Plumwood, who was almost killed by a saltwater crocodile in Kakadu National Park in 1985. Gregg Borschmann leads the conversation with anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, editor Lorraine Shannon, curator George Main, and crocodile expert Grahame Webb.

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IN THE EYE OF THE WILD

Nastassja Martin

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In the Eye of the Wild  is a terrifying account of the anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s nearly fatal encounter with a  bear, while conducting research in Siberia. As an anthropologist she  has close friendships with the   Evens (formerly Lamuts), a Tungusic people in Kamchatka  and eastern Siberia.  Instead of the objectivity that anthropologists usually employ,  she becomes "adopted in" and is a valued member of the Indigenous community. TEK (traditional ecological knowledge), the oral tradition, and the mythology of animals and land spirits is part of her work, and  meeting a Bear in the mountains causes her to face these primal forces directly.  After the bear attack she is severely mutilated, undergoes multiple operations in both Russian and French hospitals, and emerges healed but with massive scaring. At that point she decides to return to Kamchatka and discover what it means to have become, as the Evens people say -   a   miedka -   a person who is not only human but also animal. This is the only way for her to continue her work as an anthropologist, and to reconstruct herself as person.
>Article in The Guardian<        >Goodreads Link<            >RoughGhosts Review<            >Amazon Link<  

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