Biltong Hunting as a Performance of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa

(Hardback)

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Since the early 1990s, the seventeen-fold growth in South African sport hunting has made the South African wildlife ranching industry the sixth largest contributor to South Africas agricultural sector, bringing in $680 million per annum. Biltong Hunting as a Performance of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa links biltong huntings rapid growth to the 1990s disassembly of the apartheid state and analyzes how the hierarchy, and belonging that biltong hunters associate with it, emerges anew in the post-apartheid context. It examines the narrative and embodied strategies employed by hunters and farmers to create a space that naturalizes the mythic Afrikaner nationalist past in the post-apartheid present.

Reviews

Andre Goodrichs ethnography of biltong hunting is, to put it plainly, a beautiful work of scholarship. Setting out to investigate what might explain the outstanding centrality that wildlife ranching has acquired in the South African agricultural sector, he takes the reader on a tour through an always-uncertain experiment: the bringing into being of hunting nature. In post-apartheid South Africa, this very fragile and laboured kind of nature provides a space, other than the state structures, for the enactment of a nationalist mythology that gives Afrikaners a sense of masculine identity and belonging. Skilfully blending insights from Marxism, phenomenology, and science and technology studies, this work is extremely innovative and daring theoretically without being obscure; quite the contrary, the theory is well blended with the ethnography making the book a fun and interesting scholarly read. If you are interested in how nature and politics intermingle in practice, Biltong Hunting as a Performance of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa is one of those books you should not miss. -- Mario Blaser, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Andre Goodrich analyses hunting not so much as escaping modernity but rather as using an alternative modernity. He combines a sophisticated yet comprehensible theoretical underpinning and a flair for engaging ethnographic descriptions and observations based on grounded fieldwork. Goodrichs monograph provides a significant advance in understanding how hunting mediates the relationships between men and nature and its implications for masculinity, identity, and simply being human. -- Robert J. Gordon, University of Vermont

Author Bio

Andre Goodrich is senior lecturer in social anthropology at the North-West University in South Africa.