Garry Marvin
University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

Matt Cartmill

A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History
Cambridge: Harvard, 1993. xiii, 331 pp. $29.95.

There is now plenty of interest from social scientists and philosophers in a whole range of events and processes that could be loosely collected under the heading of non-human animal/human relations. Some key aspects of those relationships are not, however, as fully documented and discussed as others. One of the significant aspects of these relationships is that humans kill other animals. Humans hunt other animals, raise them for slaughter, experiment with them (often leading to their deaths) and sacrifice them. Although all of these areas have been investigated, the relationships involved in a range of hunting activities have been largely ignored.

There is a wide literature on hunting for food and the relationship that hunting peoples have with their prey, but hunting for sport has been a neglected area. This neglect of a rich area for investigation is possibly due to the fact that many people find these practices distasteful, representative of some kind of aberrant behavior, or unworthy of intellectual analysis. What Cartmill's erudite study shows is that hunting for sport is a multi-faceted area worthy of fuller ethnographic studies and comparative analyses.

A View to a Death in the Morning consists of 12 finely wrought essays with hunting as a linking theme, although some of them only touch on it tangentially. The first two chapters critically review the literature on the place of hunting in pre-hominoid and early human society and establish the wider context of the debate about the relationship between our supposed hunting origins and human nature. Other chapters explore our relationships with other animals as they are expressed in literature, philosophy, art, theology and early science.

There is a particularly fine essay, "The Bambi Syndrome." It explores the context of and response to the original novel, Bambi: A Forest Life, written by Saizmann in 1924, and how the saccharine adaptation by Disney has shaped the attitude to deer, deer hunting and wilderness for a multitude of people. He interprets the mythology of Bambi in terms of the intellectual atmosphere in Freud's Vienna, Jungian archetypes, Christian and pagan mythology, attitudes to Germans and Germany during World War II, and the politics of the conservation movement. Such rich contextualizing is a good example of the breadth of knowledge and interpretation which Cartmill brings to bear on his subject.

In terms of hunting itself, there are three particularly good essays, "The Virgin Huntress and Bleeding Feasts," "The White Stag," and "The Sobbing Deer." In these, Cartmill examines hunting in the ancient world and in medieval and early modern Europe. Here he explores the changing attitude to hunting and the images associated with it (particularly those of nature, wildness and wilderness, and the deer itself) in classical and European literature and art.

Early in the book, Cartmill sets out some important definitional qualifications of hunting for sport and the ways in which this differs from any other kind of hunting or any other kind of killing. This sort of hunting he quite rightly argues can only be understood in terms of its symbolism, not its economics. "...[H]unting in the modern world is not to be understood as a practical means of latching onto some cheap protein. It is intelligible only as symbolic behavior, like a game or a religious ceremony, and the emotions that the hunt arouses can be understood only in symbolic terms" (p. 29).

He goes on to argue that very little animal killing qualifies as hunting. So, for example, shooting a cow or a pig in a barn is not hunting, neither is running an animal over in the road, nor is catching an animal in a snare or a trap. His working definition comes down to hunting as "the deliberated, direct, violent killing of unrestrained animals; and we define wild animals in this context as those that shun or attack human beings. The hunt is thus by definition an armed confrontation between humanness and wildness, between culture and nature. Because it involves confrontational, premeditated, and violent killing, it represents something like a war waged by humanity against the wilderness" (p. 30). Such a definition offers an important starting point for coming to understand and interpret hunting for sport in all its forms.

Until the last chapter of the book Cartmill maintains a dispassionate anthropological distance from questions about the motivations of hunters and whether hunting should still take place. In this chapter, which gives the title to the book, he recapitulates his critique of hunting as a defining feature of the nature of early hominoids and their later development. Here, though, he develops this into a critical attack on men who hunt. His starting point is an encounter with the shot and mutilated cadaver of a fawn which he had seen alive on many occasions. He is clearly disturbed and troubled by it and cannot understand the motivation of the killers. He attacks as "primitive fantasy" (p. 242) the claim by many hunters that they are driven by some deep-rooted, genetically determined hunting instinct and he is concerned that there might be good reasons for linking sport hunting with a symbolic attack on women.

In concluding, Cartmill argues that there is now a dissolving of the animal-human boundary and that this undercuts the conceptual foundations of hunting which have been defined as a confrontation between the human world and the wild. Hunting, he suggests, has no place in the modern world. Stripped of its symbolic meanings, now anachronistic and morally unacceptable, there is little to distinguish it from mere butchery. Many still respond to this symbolic boundary and will continue to kill wild animals in highly ritualistic ways and claim that this is hunting.

Hunting as sport has many forms; this constitutes the only major shortcoming of A View to a Death in the Morning. In the chapters on modern hunting, Cartmill only concentrates on deer hunting in the United States. Given his breadth of interpretation it would be fascinating to have his comments on the hunting of different animals and the styles in which it is carried out. This, though, is a task for other authors. Certainly, hunting offers a rich area for analysis in terms of the construction of different hunting events, the ritualistic way it is carried out, the social relations between the humans who hunt, the meaning the activity has for them, and the relationships they establish with the animals who are hunted. Cartmill's study is compulsory reading for anyone interested in the relationships we have had and continue to have with nonhuman animals.

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