A view to a death in the morning : hunting and nature through history
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
A view to a death in the morning : hunting and nature through history
Harvard University Press, 1993
Available at 16 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-319) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
What brought the ape out of the trees, and so the man out of the ape, was a taste for blood. This is how the story went, when a few fossils found in Africa in the 1920s seemed to point to hunting as the first human activity among our simian forebears - the force behind our upright posture, skill with tools, domestic arrangements, and warlike ways. Why, on such slim evidence, did the theory take hold? In this book, Matt Cartmill searches out the origins - and the strange allure - of the myth of "Man the Hunter". He shows us how hunting has figured in the western imagination from the myth of Artemis to the power of Bambi metaphors - and how its evolving image has reflected our own view of ourselves. A biological anthropologist, Cartmill begins with the killer-ape theory in its version after World War II, and takes us back through literature and history to other versions of the hunting hypothesis. Drafted in the Renaissance, earlier accounts of Man the Hunter reveal a growing cultural uneasiness with humanity's supposed dominion over nature.
By delving further into the history of hunting, from its promotion as a maker of men and builder of character to its image as an aristocratic pastime, charged with ritual and eroticism, Cartmill shows us how the hunter has always stood between the human domain and the wild, his status changing with cultural conceptions of that boundary. Cartmill's inquiry leads us through classical antiquity and Christian tradition, medieval history, Renaissance thought, and the Romantic movement to controversies over wilderness management and animal rights. Modern ideas and doubts about human dominion find their expression in everything from scientific theories and philosophical assertions to Disney movies and sporting magazines. Cartmill's survey of these sources offers insight into the force and significance of hunting as a mythic metaphor in recent times, particularly after the savagery of the world wars reawakened doubts about man's place in nature. A study of cultural anthropology, "A View to a Death in the Morning" also aims to be a meditation on what it means to be human, to stand uncertainly between the wilderness of beast and prey and the peaceable kingdom.
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