Hunting is among the classic anthropological subjects and has typically been analysed within the empirical and conceptual frame of hunter-gatherer societies. However, the contemporary state of the art has significant blind spots. Certain regions are emphasised over others, for instance, Africa compared to Europe. Equally important, the study of subsistence hunting is privileged over an array of hunting subjects, whether recreational pastimes, wildlife management, bushmeat industry, or other emerging practices and practitioners within shifting political, economic, and ecological contexts. Ironically, European ethnology has offered a limited contribution to fill the existing knowledge gaps, leaving the cluster of Europe’s hunting nature-cultures (together perhaps with those of ‘non-native’ North America) as the least studied and understood. This roundtable’s objective is to discuss the reasons behind the omission and explore new perspectives by brainstorming about how to bring various forms of hunting, trapping and other aspects of wild animal-human relations across Europe into the disciplines’ spotlight.
Convenors & Presenters
Annika Pohl Harrisson (Convenor)
Annika Pohl Harrisson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University. Her postdoc is with the research project “Fencing the Feral – Biosecurity and the Invasive Other in the Danish-German Borderlands.” She focuses on how national spaces and borders are co-produced through the technological intervention of wildlife fencing. Her talk will engage with pig production and its logics in Denmark.
Luděk Brož is a social anthropologist based at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences where he heads the Department of Ecological Anthropology and a principal investigator of the ERC funded BOAR project. For years Luděk conducted ethnographic work in Siberia on number of issues such as hunting, local perception of archaeological work, mobility or suicide. Within the BOAR project he focuses on interface of veterinary expertise and hunting practices in the Czech Republic in the context of ongoing African Swine Fever outbreak.
Patricia Jäggi is a research associate at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Lucerne – Music. She completed a PhD in cultural anthropology, works in the field of sound and media studies and is especially interested in the interconnections of ecology, more-than-human lifeworlds and practices of extended listening and sound creation. Currently she is working on the SNSF-funded research project “Seeking Birdscapes” in which she connects autoethnographical listenings with field ornithology and sound art to better understand the soundworlds of birds. Besides scientific monographies, book chapters and articles she also works at the interface of research, mediation, and art. She has developed various soundwalks, composed sound collages and was part of the curatorial team of the sound art exhibition “Radiophonic Spaces”, which was shown at the Tinguely Museum in Basel and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.
Aivaras Jefanovas
Aivaras Jefanovas is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Research on Culture at Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania. His current research is based on the ethnography he collected during the fieldwork in Yakutia (Sakha Republic) and focuses on the human-animal anthropological studies, specifically, socio-ecological relations between indigenous hunters/reindeer herders and wolves. He will discuss hunting aspects focusing on multifaceted relations between humans and wolves in two different societies: northeastern Russia (Sakha Republic) and Eastern Europe (Lithuania).
Laine Chanteloup is currently an assistant professor in mountain resource geography at the Institute of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Lausanne and a member of the Interdisciplinary Mountain Research Centre in Sion.
Her research interests include socio-spatial dynamics between humans and animals in mountain and high-latitude territories. She worked with hunters for more than 10 years now in France, Switzerland and Canada.
Kylian Henchoz-Manitha
Kylian Henchoz-Manitha studied Anthropology at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). For his Master’s thesis, he studied the interactions between hunters, dogs and game in hunting practices in the Charentes region of western France. He is currently a PhD student in Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and assists Prof. Laine Chanteloup in his teaching and research activities. He is interested in human-animal interactions in mountain hunting practices. To carry out his research, he interviews, observes and films hunters’ practices.
Peter Schweitzer is Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is past president of the International Arctic Social Sciences Association (IASSA) and served as director of the Austrian Polar Research Institute (APRI) from 2016 to 2020.
He is working on issues of mobility, climate change, and identity in the circumpolar North, in particular in Alaska and Siberia. Human communities in the North are facing tremendous socioeconomic and environmental change. The adaptive capacity of northern groups and individuals, as much as geopolitics and global resource economics, will determine the social and cultural futures of the Arctic and Subarctic.
