UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Marc Boglioli

An illuminating cultural analysis of hunting in rural America

American hunters occupy a remarkably complex place in this country’s cultural and political landscape. On the one hand, they are cast as perpetrators of an anachronistic and unnecessary assault on innocent wildlife. On the other hand, they are lauded as exemplars of no-nonsense American rugged individualism. Yet despite the passion that surrounds the subject, we rarely hear the unfiltered voices of actual hunters in discussions of hunting.

In A Matter of Life and Death, anthropologist Marc Boglioli puts a human face on a group widely regarded as morally suspect, one that currently stands in the crossfire of America’s so-called culture wars. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Addison County, Vermont, which took him from hunting camps and sporting goods stores to local bars and kitchen tables, Boglioli focuses on how contemporary hunters, women as well as men, understand their relationship to their prey. He shows how hunters’ attitudes toward animals flow directly from the rural lifeways they have continued to maintain in the face of encroaching urban sensibilities. The result is a rare glimpse into a culture that experiences wild animals in a way that is at once violent, consumptive, and respectful, and that regards hunting as an enduring link to a vanishing past. It is a book that will challenge readers—hunters, non-hunters, and anti-hunters alike—to reconsider what constitutes a morally appropriate relationship with the non-human residents of this planet.

“An important contribution to the understanding of rural life in the United States that will be of interest to students and professionals in human/nature relationships in a variety of disciplines.”

Gerald W. Creed, coeditor of Knowing Your Place:
Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy

“A Matter of Life and Death goes well beyond the subject of hunting to document the persistence of rural traditions in the midst of a gentrifying countryside. I think the book will be used in environmental studies courses, courses in wildlife management, as well as in courses that more and more schools are offering in what is coming to be called ‘rural studies.’”

Jan E. Dizard, author of Going Wild: Hunting, Animal Rights,
and the Contested Meaning of Nature

Marc Boglioli is assistant professor of anthropology at Drew University.

Listen to Marc Boglioli talk about the book on Vermont Public Radio: http://www.vpr.net/episode/47132/

Anthropology / Environmental Studies / American Studies
208 pp.
$24.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-716-0
$80.00 library cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-715-3
November 2009

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