The Drama of Hunting (original) (raw)
Related papers
An exploration of hunting in modern society : can hunting transcend alienation?
2016
This study explores whether hunting can transcend alienation between modern society and nature in Sweden. Modernity is discussed from a Marxist perspective as being the cause of people’s alienation from nature and natural sources of production. Exploring hunting’s potential to reconnect people with nature is done through studying empirical material and interviewing Swedish hunters. The research argues that hunting educates people about their natural surroundings and provides them with an active role in natural environments through managing and harvesting wildlife. Hunters can learn to appreciate wildlife and ecosystems, bridging the alienation gap by reconnecting people with natural sources of production and facilitating the perspective that people do not exist as separate from nature. The effects of modernity on hunting are also discussed to reflect the paradox of hunting as an ancient activity in modernized world
Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal
This article undertakes a critical analysis of subjectivity and exposes the metaphysical and anthropocentric quasi-transcendental conditions that give rise to the construct(ion) of the Subject. I locate a critical moment for the metaphysical Subject in the work of Martin Heidegger which, whilst sadly not sustained in his later writings, provides a point of departure for an examination of the significance that animality plays in the metaphysical tradition and its constitutive relation to the construct of subjectivity. I discern this relation to be violent and sacrificial and draw on Jacques Derrida's nonanthropocentric ethics against the background of Drucilla Cornell's ethical reading of deconstruction to construct a critique of approaches that assimilate animals to the traditional model of subjectivity in order to represent their identity and interests in the legal paradigm. The main argument that I seek to advance is that such an approach paradoxically re-constructs the cl...
More than the kill: hunters' relationships with landscape and prey.
Current Issues in Tourism, 2009
Through a discussion of the perceptions of hunters within a New Zealand tourism context, this article explores how different perspectives of the ‘connection’ between hunter and prey are performed by participants and analysed by scholars using distinct ethical approaches. It attempts to contribute to the conversation about hunting ethics within the tourism and recreation fields by discussing the limitations of environmental ethical positions involved in analysing hunters' narratives and performances while engaging with their prey. An analysis of the sublime environment in which the hunting performance takes place proves to be central to the discussion of this sensual engagement with the hunted animal. It is argued that the contradictory feelings that sometimes prevail within hunters when it comes to the relationship between loving and killing must be considered in this kind of research and that some hunting practices are undoubtedly a way to feel close to, and engaged with, the target animals that are offered respect. Hunting expressions as dynamic cultural performances serve to generate fruitful discussions, contributing to an understanding of broader tourist relationships with nonhuman animals and the ethical issues involved in hunting practices.
On Hunting: Lions and Humans as Hunters
The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics
This is an interrogation of some commonly cited intuitions about killing animals, enjoying killing animals, and enjoying eating animals. It concludes that intuitions are the only possible philosophical guide through this territory. Accordingly if intuitions cannot be trusted, moral arguments about the killing of animals and related matters are likely to be fruitless.
A constructionist defence of environmental ethics: the case of the Swiss hunter
Castree argues that, due to implicit and explicit forms of material essentialism within many environmental ethicist arguments, a post-environmental ethics may be inevitable. The purpose of this article was to examine this claim by putting authors Castree and Proctor into a dialogue, situated within the social context of hunting in Switzerland, with the aim of navigating a path beyond the ontological mine field that environmental ethics has recently become. The results show that the critique that Castree offers can be turned into a mode of enquiry that highlights the need for environmental ethics to move beyond normative prescription to normative description. Such a move, as highlighted by the case of the Swiss hunter, allows for enquiry into how environmental ethics are socially discussed and produced, as well as offering avenues in which to interrogate and make sense of the different ways that people understand and interact with the natural world.
Countering Brutality to Wildlife, Relationism and Ethics: Conservation, Welfare and the 'Ecoversity'
Animals, 2011
Simple Summary: Wildlife cruelty is commonplace in society. We argue for a new engagement with wildlife through three elements: a relational ethic based on intrinsic understanding of the way wildlife and humans might view each other; a geography of place and space, where there are implications for how we ascribe contextual meaning and practice in human-animal relations; and, engaged learning designed around our ethical relations with others, beyond the biophysical and novel, and towards the reflective metaphysical. We propose the 'ecoversity', as a scholarly and practical tool for focusing on the intersection of these three elements as an ethical place-based learning approach.
Dreadful/Delightful Killing: the Contested Nature of Duck Hunting
Hunting ducks with a firearm has become increasingly contested in industrialized and urbanized contemporary societies. In southern New Zealand, an area that maintains strong connections to rural life ways, duck shooting is still a very popular activity. However, even duck shooters living in this region are increasingly finding that they must justify an activity their grandparents practiced without compunction. Th is paper considers ethical discourses associated with the killing of ducks, particularly the ways in which people who shoot ducks construct the act of killing as an activity that can be ethically justified. As this paper will show, duck hunters assert that they have a more realistic and appropriate view of nature and animal life cycles than the average antihunter who might criticize them. New Zealand duck hunters also embed their hunting activities within a discourse of wetland conservation, arguing that they do far more to preserve and develop wetlands than do non-hunters. Th is paper concludes that duck hunters' understandings of nature are intrinsic to the ethical discourses that underpin duck hunting activities in New Zealand.