Bear Story

Poaching Jacob Metcalf
by Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cite as: Helmreich, Stefan (2011) Bear Story. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 99/100: 148-151 (Download article PDF)

Jake Metcalf’s “Intimacy without Proximity: Encountering Grizzlies as a Companion Species,” examines not only how specific human-bear encounters have proceeded, but also asks us to consider how such encounters should proceed. They should proceed, he argues, with an aliveness to bearish difference, to the way human-bear relations diffract and produce relatings, with neither actor fully determinate in form or attitude before inter- or intra-action. He gives us a sympathetic but careful reading of Timothy Treadwell, the loner in Alaska made famous in Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Grizzly Man, and he also goes after Herzog’s incuriosity about bears, or, rather, his false hope to find something “human” in them.

In reading this paper, I kept returning to Donna Haraway’s notion of “encounter- value” in When Species Meet, of which she writes, “encounter value is about relationships among a motley array of lively beings, in which commerce and consciousness, evolution and bioengineering, and ethics and utilities are all in play. I am especially interested here in ‘encounters’ that involve, in a non-trivial and hard-to-characterize way, subjects of different biological species” (Haraway 2008:46).

What is encounter – or, better, what is value – in Metcalf’s account? It is perhaps in accounting – as Metcalf says, “I am called to offer an accounting for the long history of stories in which humans, bears, origins gods, and sexuality are entangled” (Metcalf 2008: 117). He then gives us a number of bear stories.

Joining this strategy, here is another bear story, from an old 1940s recording salvaged from a thrift store by a group of sound artists dedicated to retrieving audio ephemera from the twentieth century. The recording is of a joke, and it was meant for friends of its teller, Everett Steiner:

Ladies and gentlemen, you’ll now hear the bear story, by Everett Steiner. A Rocky Mountain hunter met a bear in a level trail on a mountainside with a cliff on one hand and a perpendicular precipice on the other. This bear hunter can neither dodge to the right nor to the left. There is no friendly tree near. His only weapon is his knife and all of his wit to fight. It was to be the bear fight of his life. He knelt down and made this prayer: “Oh Lord, I am now 40 years of age. I have never prayed to thee before in all my life. I’m not like the Methodist and the Baptist, who are constantly worrying thee with their little cares. All I have to say is if you’re not on my side, don’t be on the bear’s side, but lay low and say nothing and see the biggest bear fight you ever read about”. (on Fay and Simon 2002)

While in Everett Steiner’s Bear Story, we hear the usual stereotype of bears and humans as a priori antagonists, I want to draw attention to a curlicue in the story. In this tale, God is asked to “lay low.” So – a question: How does God or how do gods lay low in our multispecies stories? And what would happen if, as with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Poaching at the Multispecies Salon 153 we asked for a genre of history – of naturalcultural history – that made room for the supernatural?

References

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fay, Mark and Melinda Simon (Various 20th century) “Everett Steiner’s Bear Story.” Track 6 on One of One: Snapshots in
Sound. St. Helena, CA: Dish Recordings 002.

Haraway, Donna (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Herzog, Werner, director (2005) Grizzly Man. Lion’s Gate Films.

Metcalf, Jacob (2008) “Intimacy without Proximity: Encountering Grizzlies as a Companion Species.” Environmental Philosophy 5 (2):99–128.

Poaching at the Multispecies Salon

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