How large is your biotope? And how does it change? When does it change? And under what influence? That is the question that Whale Fall, English author Elizabeth O’Connor’s beautiful debut novel, offers such a sublime answer to. The year is 1938, and the protagonist is Manod, a young woman in a shrinking community on an island off the coast of Wales. In this based-on-a-true-story tale, a whale beaches on the island, along with two anthropologists from Oxford. They see the islanders as little more than research material, with Manod as their local translator. But as their research progresses, they begin to use her as a unique specimen to show the outside world. ‘Look how strange these people are!’ - a form of colonisation. As Manod learns in Whale Fall, colonisation leads to distortion and change. Tijs Goldschmidt has seen that process several times with his own eyes. The renowned Dutch evolutionary biologist and P.C. Hooft Prize winner will sit down with O’Connor to talk about that change, as his work also constantly asks the question: how does a human or animal change in, and through, its environment? Goldschmidt originally broke through with Darwin’s Dreampond, about Lake Victoria in Africa, which he observed as it changed dramatically when humans released an exotic fish into its waters. The conversation with Elizabeth O’Connor will also deal with Dansen als de meeuwen (Dancing like Seagulls), a collection of his most interesting essays, about animal behaviour, music, visual arts, Papuans, anthropology, dancing, evolution, shame, the wolf, exotic species, and many more topics that are a perfect fit for Nature’s Narrative.
Moderator: Gemma Venhuizen
English spoken
With:
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