Lexington Books
Pages: 206
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼
978-0-7391-8858-3 • Hardback • March 2015 • $114.00 • (£88.00)
978-0-7391-8859-0 • eBook • March 2015 • $108.00 • (£83.00)
Andre Goodrich is senior lecturer in social anthropology at the North-West University in South Africa.
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1The Biltong Hunting Landscape: How the Haunting of Hunting Repositions ‘Nature’
Chapter 2 The Specter’s Space: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Spatiality of Capitalist Nature
Chapter 3Violent Desire and Intimate Invisibility: How the Reciprocity of Structured Competitive Play Becomes the Hunting Nature Object-World
Chapter 4 Unlevelling the Playing Field; Unbalancing the Reciprocity: Preparing the Nature Object-World in the Commercial Hunting Context
Chapter 5 At Play in the Veld of Belonging: Symbolic Labor and the Enfolding of Nationalist Belonging into the Hunting Nature Object-World
Chapter 6 Escaping Modernity by Telling to Tell: The Narrative Education of Play and Retrospection
Chapter 7 Resistance and the Art of Domination: A Narrative Return to Dominance within an Embodied Escape from the Modern
Conclusion
References
About the Author
Andre Goodrich’s ethnography of biltong hunting is, to put it plainly, a beautiful work of scholarship. Setting out to investigate what might explain the outstanding centrality that wildlife ranching has acquired in the South African agricultural sector, he takes the reader on a tour through an always-uncertain experiment: the bringing into being of ‘hunting nature.’ In post-apartheid South Africa, this very fragile and laboured kind of ‘nature’ provides a space, other than the state structures, for the enactment of a nationalist mythology that gives Afrikaners a sense of masculine identity and belonging. Skilfully blending insights from Marxism, phenomenology, and science and technology studies, this work is extremely innovative and daring theoretically without being obscure; quite the contrary, the theory is well blended with the ethnography making the book a fun and interesting scholarly read. If you are interested in how ‘nature’ and politics intermingle in practice, Biltong Hunting as a Performance of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa is one of those books you should not miss.
— Mario Blaser, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Andre Goodrich analyses hunting not so much as escaping modernity but rather as using an alternative modernity. He combines a sophisticated yet comprehensible theoretical underpinning and a flair for engaging ethnographic descriptions and observations based on grounded fieldwork. Goodrich’s monograph provides a significant advance in understanding how hunting mediates the relationships between men and nature and its implications for masculinity, identity, and simply being human.
— Robert J. Gordon, University of Vermont