To See Them Run is an unassuming but brilliant book. With more pictures than words, it looks more like a coffee-table book than a scholarly publication and more like an ethnography than an academic argument, but its cover and approach—which begins by getting out of the way and letting the reader into the scene to interact with the coyote hunters who are the subject of the book—belie its ambitious goal: to create a space for folklorists to engage with evolutionary biologists, ecologists, and others to better understand their own disciplines.
While this book evokes authors like Aldo Leopold and his writings on wise use and Simon Bronner’s Killing Traditions, which examines the conflict between hunters and urbanites wishing to stop them, and while this book is a valuable addition to those conversations and others, those conversations are not its primary focus. Eric Eliason is more interested in examining the aesthetics of coyote coursing “from the practitioner’s point of view” and “exploring ways the biological sciences can inform the field of folklore especially by rethinking animals as full participants in, and products of, folkloric processes” (25).
The first half of the book’s purpose is borne out beautifully—in prose and photographs—through the first three chapters of the book. Eliason’s beautiful prose describes the scenes and lets the coyote hunter’s attitudes about their dogs, their finances, their wives, and their antipathy towards wrong-headed, know-it-all, never-ask-questions-or-care-to animal right’s activists and government employees from the big city who want to stop what they’re doing without understanding it. Accompanying the colorful accounts, Scott Squire’s photographs of the dogs, the rigs, the hunts, the men, the plains, the equipment, the gatherings, the enjoyment, and the material culture serve both to illustrate the aesthetic fascination the hunters experience as well as hint at some of the folkloric richness within this tradition, but are not the focus of the book.
In chapters 5 and 6, Eliason turns to his second purpose, which seems to be twofold: showing how folklorists can benefit biologists, ecologists, and others (chapter 5), and showing how folklorists can be benefited from studying current scholarship in biology and other life sciences (chapter 6). Before these chapters, scholarly analysis is kept to a minimum other than an extended comparison between new and old rigs with peacock tails and Prairie Chicken air sacks, all three “accoutrements whose costly burdens of flamboyance outstrip any possible natural selection advantage” (65). The comparison seems out of place since it is the first real foray into working with, as opposed to merely recounting, the issue at the heart of the book: evolutionary explanations for aesthetic preference and how “our relationships with animals endure because the needs that folklore fulfills are universal and because companion animals have learned to be participants in, and products of, folkloric practices” (69, 91).
While the first foray into analysis is somewhat jarring, Eliason’s final analysis is equally satisfying. In the final chapter Eliason takes what most would see as a tired and familiar trope, the persistent complaints of the men about how much it costs, but they do it anyway because they love it, and how they must all be crazy, and gives it the serious scholarly attention it deserves, but for which it has rarely been deemed worthy. He connects these easily discarded complaints and sees in them evidence that “the evolutionary roots of folkloric expression and artistic appreciation, aesthetics, excitement, love, and the sense of participation in something connected to the ways of the past, rhythms of nature, and the lives of other living beings may be why humans and animals have partnered in so many diverse ways throughout history. The advantages this gives have apparently outweighed the ones lost by the drag of domestication on our finances and health” (94). Many have traced the evolutionary roots of modern maladies, but seeing the centuries-old roots of such a common and minor-seeming complaint was delightful and profound.
While this book will certainly make a fine addition to any coffee table or cabin’s book shelf, and while it can foster understanding between hunters and non-hunters, and while it would make an excellent and accessible text for an introductory folklore course, its primary value is for anyone interested in the rich possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration between folklorists, biologists, and ecologists.
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[Review length: 711 words • Review posted on November 15, 2016]