A Matter of Life and Death: Hunting in Contemporary Vermont Review

A Matter of Life and Death: Hunting in Contemporary Vermont
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
This was an enjoyable anthropological look into modern deer hunting culture in Vermont. Having grown up inside this culture I found Marc Boglioli's insight as an 'outsider' well rounded and welcome, humanizing a traditional way of life that many people who don't hunt simply don't understand.

Click Here to see more reviews about: A Matter of Life and Death: Hunting in Contemporary Vermont

American hunters occupy a remarkably complex place in this country s cultural and political landscape. On the one hand, they are cast as perpetrators of an anachronistic and unnecessary assault on innocent wildlife. On the other hand, they are lauded as exemplars of no-nonsense American rugged individualism. Yet despite the passion that surrounds the subject, we rarely hear the unfiltered voices of actual hunters in discussions of hunting.In A Matter of Life and Death, anthropologist Marc Boglioli puts a human face on a group widely regarded as morally suspect, one that currently stands in the crossfire of America s so-called culture wars. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Addison County, Vermont, which took him from hunting camps and sporting goods stores to local bars and kitchen tables, Boglioli focuses on how contemporary hunters, women as well as men, understand their relationship to their prey. He shows how hunters attitudes toward animals flow directly from the rural lifeways they have continued to maintain in the face of encroaching urban sensibilities. The result is a rare glimpse into a culture that experiences wild animals in a way that is at once violent, consumptive, and respectful, and that regards hunting as an enduring link to a vanishing past. It is a book that will challenge readers hunters, non-hunters, and anti-hunters alike to reconsider what constitutes a morally appropriate relationship with the non-human residents of this planet.

Buy Now

Click here for more information about A Matter of Life and Death: Hunting in Contemporary Vermont

0 comments:

Post a Comment