Institut für Ethnologie, Universität Heidelberg, 18. Juli 2017
Flesh, Blood and Bones: the forgetting of the carnal in the anthropology of hunting
Thorsten Gieser, Universität Koblenz-Landau
Anthropological accounts of hunting tend to focus on the hunters‘ worldview at the expense of the hunters‘ lifeworld, i.e. the realm of lived experience. In doing so, anthropologists have neglected the concrete human-animal encounter in ‚hunting situations‘ (Widlok 2016) in favour of sociocultural ‚context‘. In this lecture I will argue that in order to understand hunting as a practice we need to describe and untangle the entanglements of the hunting situation in its embodied, sensuous, material and affective strands first before considering ‚context‘. At the heart of this situation we find the carnal: human and animal bodies entangled and transforming in the meshwork of the landscape; bodies alive with feelings and sensations (the Leib), but also wounded and dead bodies (the Körper).