This paper explores how walking in bear-inhabited landscapes in Croatia, becomes a multispecies, affective, and ethical practice—revealing how humans and brown bears co-create meaningful landscapes through stories, sensory experiences, and shared presence.
Paper long abstract
Walking with Bears: Multispecies Encounters and the Storying of Landscape
In the mountainous regions of Croatia, where humans and brown bears (Ursus arctos) have long shared a landscape, walking becomes more than a mode of movement—it is a narrative practice shaped by multispecies presence. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the mountainous regions of Croatia, this paper explores how walking through bear-inhabited forests is experienced as a form of embodied storytelling, where landscape, memory, and emotion intersect. Personal anecdotes, traces of bear activity, and artistic interventions—such as those at the “Mystic Place” created by Bear Refuge volunteers at the village of Kuterevo — reveal how both humans and bears leave narrative imprints upon the land. These encounters evoke a heightened awareness and sensory attunement, prompting what Julie Andrews calls “biophilic attention.” This contribution will consider how bear encounters alter the way one walks—and the stories one tells and how landscapes shared with large carnivores provoke both fear and reverence, ethics and enchantment?