#Hunting
The hunter is thought to be the first storyteller. Indeed, he was the only one capable of reading series of coherent events in mute (if not imperceptible) traces left by its preys.
Carlo Ginzburg
Becoming-animals are neither dreams nor fantasies. They are absolutely real. But how real?Deleuze & Guattari
Especially in its sportive form, hunting is commonly understood as a kind of pastiche ritual, yet susceptible of reinstating authentic existential conditions. Regardless of its vital aims, the brutality of hunting generates ever growing, blunt disapprovals. Confined in emotional and conflicting registers, one can fail – legitimately – to see the heuristic relevance of a practice deemed anachronistic. Yet, such an archetypical figure becomes even more instructive as nature now significantly inhabits individual consciousnesses and has become a primordial political and economic question. However, a gradual distance between people and their natural elements paradoxically accompanies this increasing awareness. While daily habits actualize ecological discourses, the profound nature of our habitats is neutralised by sterilizing and domesticating logics. In regards to contemporary western ways of living, hunting radically questions our ambivalent perceptions of the environment.
As Carlo Ginzburg points out, on the basis of almost insignificant details, hunting mobilizes modes of knowledge enabled by the re-composition of complex realities. Humming leaves, cracking branches, smells or footprints compose an entourage of stealthy traces that once reassembled and signified enables a hunter to track its game. The world becomes a sibylline topography through which paths are drawn, myths created and traditions transmitted. Thanks to those tangible and disparate connections, trajectories can be reconstructed in the same way stories are told. Thus, chains of unseen elements become embodied. Hunting is fundamentally allegorical: this leaning towards the mythological constitutes the core narrative of L’Art de la Chasse.
Located somewhere between ethnographic investigation, photo-novel and initiatory epic, L’Art de la Chasse goes beyond partisan opinions and constitutes an invitation to reconsider fundamental processes that characterize this practice. Thanks to a forensic depiction of those vernacular know-hows, situations and skills that have been deemed obsolete become the subject of a renewed and steady attention. The production and the transmission of knowledge, our interdependency towards animal reigns and our ambivalent relationships towards rituals and death are some of the themes which underlie this symbolic game hunting.
This initiatory chronicle allows for the understanding of equivocal manoeuvres through which discursive reasoning is distributed along the lines of complex and instinctive inductions. During the hound, subtle processes of reciprocal assimilation and contagion literally enable the hunter and the coveted beast to be joined together. They become one and only body. During this unique moment of indeterminacy, the hunter is subjected to the becoming-animal. This fluctuating alliance does not simply involve the mutation from one condition to another one, but rather the actualization of unprecedented and unpredictable identities.
From a multitude of scattered elements, it is finally possible to tune up this cryptic, yet real, animal. This syncretic quest calls for practices of poaching in territories where rational analysis has lost its authority. At the same time, the prey of this fantastical game hunting is not necessarily the one we imagined. This convergence creates an entity formed of hunter and beast which defies every category. By entering a different reality, both have become something else. Sublimating death and our zeitgeist, L’Art de la Chasse, constitutes the ideal alibi to sketch the borders of the human from the non-human.
Joël Vacheron (translated by Adeena Mey)
“Le Règne de la furtivité (Charting Stealthiness)” was published in L’Art de la Chasse, Régis Tosetti, JRP | Ringier (2009)
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