Description
Book SynopsisRifling through Nature analyzes landscape, hunting, identity, and belonging by examining the staging of biltong hunting on wildlife ranches in South Africa. It examines how hunting landscapes have become sites where formerly dominant white settler masculinity can perform rootedness and belonging vis-a-vis its loss of political power.
Trade ReviewAndre 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
Table of ContentsDedication Introduction Chapter 1 The 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 3 Violent 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
