ABOUT THIS BOOK

From pets to prey to food, the hierarchy of animals' relationship to humans has profound anthropological and ecological implications.

Modernity has divided animals into two categories: those deemed worthy of protection and affection, and those reduced to raw material for industry. How can we make sense of this strange split between protective love and intensive exploitation? Hunting, which both predates this opposition and continues to unsettle it, provides an exceptional vantage point from which to examine our contradictory relationship with living beings in the midst of an ecological crisis. Drawing on an immersive field study, Charles Stépanoff documents the accelerated erosion of rural biodiversity, and the paradoxical relationships between hunting, protection, and compassion. Over the course of this rich journey, he sheds new light on the anthropological and ecological foundations of the violence inflicted on living beings, as well as on the wild origins of political sovereignty. Ultimately, by questioning the peculiar moral hierarchy that this violence produces today, Stépanoff gives our moral and emotional perception a deeper field of vision.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Charles Stépanoff is director of studies in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Stépanoff is the author of Journeys into the Invisible, also published by HAU. Nora Scott has translated numerous books in anthropology and related social sciences. In 2013, she was awarded the prestigious French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

REVIEWS

“Hunting provokes scandal. But what is it exactly that so disturbs us? The living world is both more brutal and more rich than we can measure—and perhaps more than we can bear. By showing that hunters—those close yet distant figures—still have something vital to tell us, Stépanoff argues for a ‘pluralism of cosmologies and ways of life.’ Above all, he reminds us to face, without flinching, the otherness of people and of animals, the inexhaustible prodigality of life.” Florent Georgesco, Le Monde des livres, 5 December 2021

“The great merit of this work—beyond its evident anthropological value—is that it reopens the field and loosens the stranglehold of binary oppositions, even as the historical lens shows how heavily these weigh on the moral frameworks that shape our relations to nature. … It now stands as an essential reference for anyone seeking to understand a practice at once distant and familiar, one that joins direct engagement with the wild to the most intricate forms of symbolic organization.” Jean-Louis Fabiani, Books and Ideas https://laviedesidees.fr/Hunting-high-and-low10 October 2023

“Bringing together social anthropology and history, L’Animal et la Mort establishes its author as one of the keenest observers of the contradictions of modern life.” Youness Bousenna – Socialter 26 October 2021

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Figures
Introduction
Part One. Wars of the Wild
Chapter 1. The Great Depopulation of the Plains
Chapter 2. The Partridge Disaster
Chapter 3. The Flight of the Swallow
Chapter 4. The Hedge, an Edge between Worlds
Chapter 5. The Triumph of the “Bête Noire”
Chapter 6. Eat What You Kill, Kill What You Eat
Chapter 7. My Intimate Pest
Chapter 8. From Gathering to Harvesting: The Management Revolution
Chapter 9. A Neo-Savage Ritual in France
Chapter 10. Commercial Hunting
Chapter 11. The Forest Is at War
Chapter 12. Of Dogs and Men
Chapter 13. Animism in Minor Mode
Chapter 14. Pleasure and Imagination
Part Two. Sovereignty and Wild Blood from the Beginning to the Present Day
Chapter 15. The Empathetic Predator
Chapter 16. Cosmopolitical Power
Chapter 17. The Raven’s Share: An Outline of the Ontology of Butchery
Chapter 18. Society of Landowners and Disciplinary Power
Chapter 19. Protection and Compassion
Part Three. Ethics and Counter-Ethics of Predation
Chapter 20. The Stag’s Tears
Chapter 21. “A Woman Who Kills Is a Monster”
Chapter 22. The Hermit, the Monk, and the Hunter
Chapter 23. Anti-Hunting Sentiment
Chapter 24. On the Division of Moral Labor
Conclusion. Metaphysics of Predation
Acknowledgments
References