Marc Boglioli, now an assistant professor of anthropology at Drew University, would have you know that he is a bonafide anthropologist even if he has not ventured to the remote ends of the earth. His fieldwork site is in Vermont, and he understands that it may raise some readers’ eyebrows who may wonder what kind of natives are hunters. He also has personal narratives to share about academics not so politely questioning his ethical values for pursuing the subject of hunting, unless he is out to expose those killers for the brutes they must be. In fact, he confesses that he shoots guns and has hunted since he was nine years old in his rural upbringing. When it came time to do his dissertation, he became, in his words, a participant-observer in Vermont hunting camps, to address questions of animal-human beliefs held by rural and urban folk.
Maybe Boglioli would feel less angst had he approached the subject as a folklorist. Folklorists would not bat an eye about fieldwork in the American woodlands (as the Vermont Folklife Center’s series on hunting shows, which Boglioli does not utilize), although to be fair, he still might have faced not-so-polite questions pursuing hunting as expressive culture. Boglioli could have built on several folkloristically oriented American studies such as George Magoon and the Down-East Game War by Edward Ives (1988, 1993), Wild Games edited by Eric Eliason and Dennis Cutchins (2009), the special issue of Western Folklore on hunting and fishing edited by Jacqueline Thursby (2004), and my own Killing Tradition (2008)—none of which he cites, by the way. About as close as he gets to folkloristic material is mentioning a conversation he had with Vermont folklorist Dick Sweterlitsch. The folklorist smartly instructed Boglioli that a story he heard was apocryphal (95). But folklore does not constitute Boglioli’s “data,” as the author is fond of saying. The information he draws on mostly comes from interviews in which he apparently was looking for attitudes toward nature, killing, government regulation, and gender. Although he claims to primarily engage ethnography for his method, one does not read the kind of event analysis associated with Geertzian ethnographic “thick description,” except for a brief look at a controversial coyote-killing contest (chapter 7). The preceding chapter on deer camp certainly could have contained more of a sense of the practices that render camp a cultural scene. One does not even get much detail on the interviews or interviewees; there are no visual ethnographic data, that is, photographs, to illuminate the cultural scenes. There is also not much rhetorical reading of verbal art or customs as projections of anxieties or feelings that are difficult to express in conversation. His discussion of camp humor seems promising because he takes up the “inept woodsman” theme in narrative exchange, but the reader does not get the meat of examples to sink teeth into. Maybe that is not the best metaphor for a reviewer of hunting literature to use, but the point is that for an ethnography of hunters’ culture, one does not get depth on cultural expressions.
That is not to say that what Boglioli has to offer is insignificant. He summarizes well the attitudes of hunters toward nature, regulation, self-sufficiency, and “antis” (protestors against hunting). He is at his best when engaging symbolic analysis such as his insightful discussion employing cognitive categorization of hunters’ views of the difference between killing coyotes and deer. He has a good reading of the distinctive material culture of hunters when he finds a pattern to the choices made in clothing worn by hunters. He relates well the historical and sociological context of Vermont that has rendered it a hunting culture. Probably his best section, one worth excerpting, is his exposing and explaining the pragmatic paradox that hunters pursue deer in the woods whereas they are more likely to dwell outside the area. He recognizes that hunters have other reasons for being in the woods, including relating to nature and to one another in relative isolation. Boglioli is convincing in making the argument that hunting epitomizes a rural worldview and much of the satisfaction of hunting for hunters is in socializing. His application of Gramsci’s concept of “contradictory consciousness” is well-suited to the women hunters he interviewed, for they are influenced by traditional gender ideologies while working to establish new understandings of gender in the practices of everyday life. He does not subscribe to psychological readings of hunters’ expressive culture representing regenerative masculine displays through ritualized or framed violence because he takes what his interviewees have said at face value. He has not dug deeper to find meanings outside of their awareness, and I felt he could have. He has comparative sociological interpretations to make about the masculinity expressed by hunters by drawing on the work of Michael Herzfeld on manhood in a Cretan mountain village and Miguel de Alameida’s study of cultural performances of aggressive and dominating masculinity in a Portuguese café. He also builds on the significant insights of sociologist Jan Dizard on nature-civilization discourse.
Boglioli covers a lot of ground in the book, but the title is an indication of a theme that stands out—the need felt by hunters for authentic experience as engaged in a social practice (Boglioli rightly eschews categorization of hunting as sport) involving boundaries of life and death, animal and human, and nature and civilization. If the book is not rich in detail on expressive genres (maybe he should have talked more to Sweterlitsch!), it is nonetheless engaging to read with some of the best academic prose I have encountered. Readers will certainly have a good sense of Boglioli’s vantage in a captivating first-person narrative, even if he seems overly obsessed about pleasing his anthropological masters rather than working toward an interdisciplinary understanding of hunting. This book gives added material to ponder toward that goal, and a reminder to folklorists of the value of their evidence.
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[Review length: 986 words • Review posted on September 1, 2010]