Hunting in Late Modernity

Hunters are considered crucial stakeholders in wildlife management in many countries. In North-America and some European countries, hunting is seen as an important management tool and hunting fees provide revenue for agencies.... [ view full abstract ]

Hunters are considered crucial stakeholders in wildlife management in many countries. In North-America and some European countries, hunting is seen as an important management tool and hunting fees provide revenue for agencies. In North America in particular, participation in hunting has decreased in recent years, causing concern about agency funding as well as the future of hunting as a tool for management.

However, decreasing participation is only one of the changes that affect hunting in modern societies, and other changes may be just as consequential for wildlife management and conservation. For centuries, subsistence hunting has been paralleled by (and sometimes in conflict with) recreational hunting by nobility and eventually a wealthy upper class. While this is a long-standing dualism, a crucial change in post-WW2 developed nations has been an almost total shift away from satisfying subsistence needs to all hunters being recreationally motivated. To hunting critics, this means hunting has become “a brutal anachronism that has outlived its utility”. The subject of this session/panel will be the coping responses by contemporary hunters in the face of their increasingly challenged activity, and the ways in which they utilize hunting in collective identity projects inherent in late modernity. Modernization is not only changing the character of hunting, but brings with it new globalization influences, ranging from global biodiversity conservation policies, commodification of wildlife to the influx of new demographics in the hunting community.

           Significantly, hunters respond to the challenges of modernity in unanticipated ways, and it is these responses we are interested in interrogating. Hunters come from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, and hunting may be embedded in a corresponding variety of sociocultural contexts. Like many other activities, hunting as production of social meaning can be divided e.g. along lines of class and rurality. In some contexts, for example, hunting communities have responded to modernization by re-asserting traditional identities, defensive localism and exhibiting forms of everyday resistance toward the state and broader society. This could be seen as a form of “infrapolitics”. Illegal hunting may be one extreme instance of such resistance.

Modernization forces affect hunters not only from the outside; within the hunting institution hunters cope with the changing contours of hunting by imparting divisions among themselves resulting in sub-groupings, stereotyping, peer policing and ‘internal’ politics. Various forms of hunting may support different identity projects, rooted in different social and cultural contexts. Notably, as hunting has been detached from its role as a form of material production to now fulfilling late-modern society’s range of socio-psychological needs of self-realization, leisure and spirituality, hunters face emerging trends of cosmopolitan hunting, canned hunting, ‘urban outsiders’ desiring fast action, rising lease costs on land, influx of new technology that increasingly shifts the balance of fair chase between the hunter and the quarry and more. They result in new and diverse politics, social identities and attitudes regarding wildlife. We argue this has profound implications on the role of hunting in modern societies, and consequently for the role of hunters in wildlife management and nature conservation.