Hunting and the Ivory Tower

Description

Seventeen hunter-scholars explore the hunting experience and question common negative stereotypes

Despite the academy having a reputation for supporting broad and open inquiry in scholarship, some academics have not extended this open-minded support to colleagues' personal pursuits. A variety of scholars enjoy hunting, which has been stereotyped by some as an activity of the unsophisticated. In Hunting and the Ivory Tower, Douglas Higbee and David Bruzina present essays by seventeen hunter-scholars who explore the hunting experience and question negative assumptions about hunting made by intellectuals and academics who do not hunt.

Higbee and Bruzina suspect most academics' understanding of hunting is based on brief television news reports of hunter-politicians and commercials for reality TV shows such as Duck Dynasty. The editors contend that few scholars appreciate the complexities of hunting or give much thought to its ethical, ecological, and cultural ramifications. Through this anthology they hope to start a conversation about both hunting and academia and how they relate.

The contributors to this anthology are academics from a variety of disciplines, each with firsthand hunting experience. Their essays vary in style and tone from the scholarly to the personal and represent the different ways in which scholars engage with their avocation. The essays are grouped into three sections: the first focuses on the often-fraught relation between hunters and academic culture; the second section offers personal accounts of hunting by academics; and the third portrays hunting from an explicitly academic point of view, whether in terms of value theory, metaphysics, or history. Combined, these essays render hunting as a culturally rich, deeply personal, and intellectually satisfying experience worthy of further discussion.

A foreword is provided by Robert DeMott, the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He is a teacher, writer, critic, and internationally respected expert on novelist John Steinbeck.

Sujets

• Sports
• EDUCATION
• Bison hunting
• Devonshire Hunting Tapestries
• Bear hunting
• Boar hunting
• Philosophy
• Field dressing (hunting)
• On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
• Deer hunting
• Animal rights
• Human hunting
• Hunting knife
• Waterfowl hunting
• Boone and Crockett Club
• Trophy hunting
• Medieval hunting
• Gamekeeper
• Stag hunt
• Foxhound
• Fox hunting
• Recreation
• Hunting
• Fox Hound

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 11 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611178500
• Langue: English

Extrait

Hunting and the Ivory Tower
Hunting and the Ivory Tower
Essays by Scholars Who Hunt
EDITED BY
Douglas Higbee and David Bruzina
FOREWORD BY Robert DeMott

The University of South Carolina Press
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-849-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-850-0 (ebook)
Front cover illustration by Sarah Petrulis
Contents
Foreword
ROBERT DEMOTT
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Academics and Hunting
Part I
Between Academic and Hunting Cultures: Starting the Conversation
Gun and Gown: Coming Out of the Tower s Closet
TOVAR CERULLI
Becoming-Academic and Becoming-Animal: New Jersey s Suburbia to the Alaskan Bush
ANNETTE WATSON
Out of the Closet
DONALD A. MUNSON
The Knife, the Deer, and the Student: Academic Transformations
LEE FOOTE
A View from the Saddle: The Provocative Mystique of Foxhunting Culture
ALISON ACTON
Duck Dynasty: Hunting for Nonhunters
PHILIP MASON
Part II
Why We Hunt: Personal Accounts
Deer Stand
JEREMY LLOYD
Snake Bit on the Ogeechee
GERALD T. THURMOND
Contemporary Medieval Boar Hunting
RICHARD SWINNEY
An Ode to Machines: On Coming Late to Hunting
J. B. WEIR
Squirrel Hunting and the View from Here
DAVID BRUZINA
Part III
Because We Hunt: Intellectualizing Hunting
Hunting Ethics: Reflections from a (Mostly) Vegetarian Hunter
DAVID GRAHAM HENDERSON
The Catch and Release Conundrum
DAVID SELIGMAN
Vacating the Human Condition: Academics, Hunters, and Animals According to Ortega y Gasset
GREGORY A. CLARK
Confessions of a Sublime Ape
MICHAEL C. RYAN
Hunting Time: Philosophy Afield
BRIAN SEITZ
Rebuilding the Wholesome Machinery of Excitement: Virtue and Hunting
CHARLES J. LIST
Appendix: An Annotated List of Recommended Hunting Texts
DOUGLAS HIGBEE
Notes
Contributors
Index
ROBERT DEMOTT
Foreword
[Hunting] certainly makes life less highfalutin and more real.
T. H. White, England Have My Bones
Fifty years ago, during my first semester as a graduate student, I enrolled in a seminar on William Faulkner, a writer I d heard of but never before encountered on the page. I d heard that he was a difficult and demanding technician whose prose was convoluted, intricate, even impenetrable, and that it represented the zenith of American literary modernism, which is to say patently aesthetic and rarefied. I considered myself an average reader in skill, insight, and dexterity, so I feared I would be in for a trying time, given Faulkner s avant-garde stylistic difficulties. But I also heard that Faulkner had a reputation as a drunk, a bounder, and, as if it were the final condemnatory nail in his coffin, a hunter. Faulkner, the gossip went, was not in the take-no-prisoners category of He-Man Hemingway, but he was a hunter nonetheless, and that was enough for many of my seminar mates to cast a cold eye.
But it was precisely Faulkner the hunter ( a good hunter and one of the fairest and most agreeable men we ever had in our camp, John Cullen said in Old Times in the Faulkner Country ) who appealed to me, and so I went into the course vowing to keep an open mind. Reading Faulkner in a Midwest urban university setting in the mid-1960s, recently married and trying to set a responsible course in life with my wife and first child and cut off for who knew how long from my already considerable hunting and fishing experience as a boy and young man in New England, made me value the hunt and its attributes, such as they were, more acutely than ever, though (nostalgia aside) I was never sure that I d employ them again in a large-scale way.
If graduate school panned out as I hoped it would, I might be headed for a job somewhere in urban territory in a concrete and steel environment. That would not be my preferred venue, but it was a gambit I would have to play as it lay and be willing to accept for the sake of my family if it came to pass. Whatever job I eventually landed would have nothing to do with my outdoor avocations and everything to do with my academic abilities.
Just at the moment I was bargaining with myself over issues of capitulation, steeling myself to those eventualities and imperatives, and additionally unsure that I could ever add anything meaningful to the lit-crit discussion, I encountered the scene in chapter 6 of Absalom, Absalom! where Quentin Compson and his father are hunting quail in a driving rain behind two dogs, and, in their back-and-forth wayfaring behind what I supposed were quartering pointers, father and son discover Thomas Sutpen s and Ellen Coldfield Sutpen s dilapidated gravestones. The discovery added fuel to Quentin s obsessive reconstruction of the Sutpen tragedy, and it gave me a way into Faulkner s highfaluting Modernist prose labyrinth that I might otherwise have never gotten. In Faulkner, I realized, each reader becomes a hunter as well, picking up the trail and its scent, so to speak, in order to corner, if not capture, the fleeting text.
So behind Faulkner s vaunted linguistic artifice and stylistic sleight of hand, there was a backdrop of gritty physical reality to be imagined-wet, tired dogs, empty shot shells, heft of dead quail in the game bag, a man and child hunting together-that (except for Luster and the mule) resonated deeply with me and echoed similar events in my own life. For someone who had never thought much about the physical underpinnings of literature, the scene was a crossover moment between the world outside and the world inside my books, a startling moment, in other words, as sharp and compelling as the first flush of a covey of wild bobwhites.
English setters, beagles, fox hounds-my own or my uncles -were a large part of the sporting fabric of my working-class family life in Connecticut and Vermont. Bird dogs and trailing hounds were part of an earlier education mentored by my uncles Pete and Tony Ventrella that had taken place outside school and that I admit, because of its visceral quality, often commanded more of my attention than homework. Later in the Faulkner semester, when we tackled Go Down, Moses and his signature outdoor tale, The Bear, in which a hunting dog is a chief character, my enthusiasm was boundless, and I became something of a village explainer expounding on the intricacies of hunting and the dynamic of the chase to my untutored and mostly urban male and female seminar mates, whether they wanted to hear it or not.
The Bear and Delta Autumn brought out the most heated critical discussions on literature I had ever witnessed up to that point. There was much to debate: spilling blood, gun violence, racial injustice, white privilege, wilderness decline, hunting ethics, and especially Faulkner s portrayal of Ike McCaslin, whose pattern of masculine behavior featured a willful withdrawal from domestic society. Half the class judged that characterization to be romantic, even heroic, and saw Ike as an exemplar of resolute American frontier values; the other half said Faulkner was treating Ike ironically and that whatever he had learned in the big woods of the Mississippi Delta was undercut or tempered by his relative ineffectualness in social, domestic, and emotional spheres.
And though I saw validity on both sides of the debate, then as now, none of those issues, none of those controversial and emotionally charged questions, could be solved or answered to everyone s complete satisfaction. The hunter in me left that seminar with an abiding sense of how suspiciously and inaccurately the academic world viewed hunting, and yet the scholar in me admired the way the academy rigorously interrogated the subject. More to the point, I came away certain that where hunting (like every other hot-button issue) is concerned, ironies and paradoxes abound, not hard and fast conclusions. In the end, we make a separate peace according to our own lights and predilections. Rabid adherents for and against hunting, which is to say extremists of both stripes loudly occupying their high ground (moral and otherwise), are the only ones who believe they have answers to otherwise nuanced and complex problems.

In my case, to leaven sixty-plus years of regimented, lock-step college life-first as an undergraduate and graduate student, then as a professor at a public university in a rural, lightly populated quadrant of Ohio where opportunities to hunt and fish proved to be numerous and varied-I indulged in an increasingly steady but less predictable nonivory-tower diet of duck marshes and upland coverts to keep a sane perspective on the academic world. Change-up is good. I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, Huck Finn famously concludes his narrative, before his Aunt Sally can sivilize him. As we all know, his words have become a palimpsest, a hieroglyphic, of escape, as well as a flashpoint for critical controversy and skepticism.
But high-tailing it to unspoiled wilderness territory is less feasible for most of us than it was in Twain s time, so let s be thankful we still have the tonic of local wildness to temper our otherwise well-ordered and routine civic life and to act not just as a safety net but as a refuge and source of restoration for periods of personal dissolution, job-induced ennui, and wit s-end mania. As Jim Harrison says, I ve found that I survive only by