Nastassja scheels biography of martin

Born and raised high in the French Alps, the anthropologist Nastassja Martin has always been happiest at great heights, where the demands of steepness, mountains, and weather cannot be ignored.

Her first field of study was among the indigenous Gwich’in people of Alaska, under the supervision of Philippe Descola; out of this research, she wrote her first book, Les Âmes sauvages: face à l’Occident, la résistance d’un peuple d’Alaska (Savage Souls: an Alaskan people’s resistance to the West), published in France in 2016.

Martin sought to discover how much and in what ways the Gwich’in culture had been inflected by their existence within the wider jurisdiction of the United States. She also developed a deep interest in animism and its survival into contemporary culture.

Martin then wanted to study and compare the same questions in a similarly indigenous culture that had been subject to very different pressures, one that had been subsumed within a very different st