Wo(men) and Bears The Gifts of Nature, Culture and Gender Revisited edited by Kaarina Kailo ISBN 978-0-9782233-6-6 October 2008 /408 pgs / $34.95 50 pages of artwork ORDER | CONTENTS | OVERVIEW | AUTHOR BIOS | REVIEW (COMING SOON)

Overview:

The spirit of Bear is awakening
The Heart Hears
with some Strange Ear
— Irma Heiskanen


Wo(men) and Bears revisits classical debates in women’s cultural and Native studies regarding nature and culture. As a mixed-genre anthology—academic and poetic, conversational and critical—the book consists of interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches on a widely-circulated ancient myth, story, history, and sacred law (ayaawux) focused on wo(men) co-habiting with bears where women defy dualistic gender roles and relations and interact with nature in a variety of adaptive or transgressive ways.

“The Girl Who Married the Bear” is an old tale with numerous cross-cultural variants and fragments that can be found throughout Northern and Mediterranean Europe and across the Northern hemisphere from North America to Siberia and Mongolia. The story’s popularity derives from its simple core: it addresses through a series of agonizing dilemmas two of the most fundamental and decisive issues of life: marriage and death. The variants have to do with traces of powerful suppressed worldviews where humans and animals are seen as interdependent and equal parts of the ecological chain of being. The elaborate bear ceremonial or feast can thus be seen as a means of renewing a mutually respectful socio-cosmic pact among all the members of an extended family of relations.

Cross-cultural fragments and stories of Bear receive discursive and conversive attention from Armenian, Finnish, Canadian, American, German, Greenland, Sami, Tsimshian, Tlingit, and Anishnabe scholars, storytellers, poets, and artists.

This anthology is of interest not only to students and scholars but anyone interested in archaeology or anthropology, cultural and women’s studies, sociology, ethnography, comparative religious studies, mythology, folklore, northern and arctic studies, Native studies, ecocriticism/ecofeminism, and feminist theory/body politics.

This wonderful, erudite and poetic book contributes to our knowledge about pre-patriarchal cultures and gives us the vision of a future where the life-giving value of women and nature is restored, and everyone is freed from patriarchal capitalism.

—Genevieve Vaughan, author of For-Giving: A Feminist Critique of Exchange and Homo Donans

The articles collected in this anthology present a new way looking at the circumpolar Bear Cult. Contributors are critical towards the "bearlore" of the patriarchal androcentric scholarship that has created the oppositions of nature vs. culture, humans vs. animals, and male vs. female. The new approaches presented here are much closer to the thinking of Indigenous cultures and a matriarchal worldview that is comprehensive, nurturing, and inclusive of all living beings.

—Heide Goettner-Abendroth, author of The Goddess and Her Heros


Kaarina Kailo has published over 70 articles on a wide range of topics from feminism and neoliberalism, Indigenous women and anti-racism, the gift imaginary, gendered violence (shameful femicides), peaceful societies to cyber/ecofeminism and women’s spirituality. She has published a book on economic violence, neoliberalism, and healing from violence, Irti talousväkivallasta—reseptejä solidaariseen hyvinvointiin (Emancipating from Economic Violence: Recipes Towards a Solidarity-Based Well-Being) (2007), and has co-edited books on postcolonialism and Sami Indigenous people, No Beginning, No End: The Sami Speak Up (in Finnish and English), with Elina Helander (1998, 1999); on ecopsychology and healing, Ekopsykologia ja perinnetieto—polkuja eheyteen, with Irma Heiskanen (2006); and Ecopsychology and Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Paths to Wholeness, also with Irma Heiskanen (2006); on North-American sauna stories and the sweat-lodge, Sweating with the Finns, North American Sauna Stories, with Raija Warkentin and Jorma Halonen (2006).