Biltong Hunting as a Performance of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa

By (author) Andre Goodrich

Publication date:

18 March 2015

Length of book:

200 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739188583

Since the early 1990s, the seventeen-fold growth in South African sport hunting has made the South African wildlife ranching industry the sixth largest contributor to South Africa’s agricultural sector, bringing in $680 million per annum. Biltong Hunting as a Performance of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa links biltong hunting’s rapid growth to the 1990s disassembly of the apartheid state and analyzes how the hierarchy, and belonging that biltong hunters associate with it, emerges anew in the post-apartheid context. It examines the narrative and embodied strategies employed by hunters and farmers to create a space that naturalizes the mythic Afrikaner nationalist past in the post-apartheid present.

Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1The Biltong Hunting Landscape: How the Haunting of Hunting Repositions ‘Nature’
Chapter 2 The Specter’s Space: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Spatiality of Capitalist Nature
Chapter 3Violent Desire and Intimate Invisibility: How the Reciprocity of Structured Competitive Play Becomes the Hunting Nature Object-World
Chapter 4 Unlevelling the Playing Field; Unbalancing the Reciprocity: Preparing the Nature Object-World in the Commercial Hunting Context
Chapter 5 At Play in the Veld of Belonging: Symbolic Labor and the Enfolding of Nationalist Belonging into the Hunting Nature Object-World
Chapter 6 Escaping Modernity by Telling to Tell: The Narrative Education of Play and Retrospection
Chapter 7 Resistance and the Art of Domination: A Narrative Return to Dominance within an Embodied Escape from the Modern
Conclusion
References
About the Author

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.