Overview

Full Product Details

9780739188583

Table of Contents

Reviews

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

Author Information

Andre Goodrich is senior lecturer in social anthropology at the North-West University in South Africa.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available