“Feels Like Not Calling My Mother”: Hunting’s Religious-Ethical Significances for Men on the r/Hunting Subreddit

In contradistinction to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or even TikTok, Reddit neither requires nor even particularly coheres around users’ posting content that might reveal their identities outright: usernames are rarely based on one’s “real name,” most content does not include the poster’s image–if it is even personally related to them at all–and the creation of friend or follower networks is neither a specific aim of the site nor of most redditors.  The anonymity this can potentially afford users–though it can be overstated in ways I explore–has contributed to Reddit’s reputation as a bastion of misogyny, queer- and transphobia, racism, and other forms of hate speech, if not of the caliber of a platform like 4chan.  And while it would be harmful, not to mention fallacious, to suggest that Reddit, and especially certain subreddits, does not function in these ways, this paper focuses on the ways masculinities inflect and engender the discursive formation of ethical structures and religious cosmologies.  By providing the vehicle by which men can discuss the masculinized practice of hunting, Reddit and r/Hunting enable a rigorous discursive community that reveals the workings of masculinities in the reflexive work men do when they consider their ethics and religious worldviews.

Taking the lead of users of the subreddit r/Hunting, my analysis views hunting through the lens of ritual.  On the one hand, I do this because hunting is legible in many ways as a ritualized practice, not least of all to the hunters themselves.  And yet, this kind of move bears the potential for rehearsing tired searches for religion behind every bush: hunting is not “a” religion, though it can be religious.  When I use ritual to understand hunting, I do so because religious studies offers theoretical tools that can help us schematize our analyses.  As John Dewey argues, primary experience well-analyzed furnishes secondary objects of reflection that in turn help us to better understand primary experience; any other use of theory is aloof. 

My analysis uses a tripartite conceptualization of ritual in which the symbolic/expressive, the technical/disciplinary, and the effectual/remote comprise three interrelated aspects of the cultural-religious work hunting does for r/Hunting users.  For the subreddit’s hunters, the symbolic import of hunting revolves around its ability to triangulate them into three temporal-spatial networks of relationships: the agnatic line of their ancestors (a chain), their living kin (a web), and other living things (a matrix).  Even more, hunting gives them occasion to reflect on and theorize the meaning of these relationships.  Hunting as ritual is also disciplinary.  Technical mastery in hunting–from the ability to sit still in silence for hours to gaining the precision to hit a target of a few square inches from 100 yards away–disciplines the body and mind of the hunter.  Indeed, hunting thereby disciplines ethical comportment into the practitioner, transforming him from a mere sadistic killer of animals into a compassionate hunter of them: true hunters, r/Hunting users say, not only do not take joy in the animal’s death, they mourn it.  Having the right ritual implements and knowing how to use them thus protects a hunter from becoming a killer.  Finally, hunting as ritual is meant to be effectual at a remove from the body of the hunter.  R/Hunting users imagine their practices as potentially capable of smoothing crests and troughs in populations.  Here again, the reduction of suffering figures heavily.  Prey animal populations not subject to hunting, they argue, may outbreed their food supply and face mass starvation.  Likewise, predator populations left uncontrolled will not only devastate prey populations but themselves suffer mass starvation once the prey are depleted.  In either case, hunting is believed to produce stability and balance in ecosystems, oftentimes at great remove from the ritual actor, and rarely based on scientistic, “empirical” evidence.

Throughout, this paper lays bare the ambivalences of violence for hunters, uncovering its multivalence.  The moment of violence, the kill (euphemized on r/Hunting as “the harvest”), brings the hunter into intimate relationship with the harvest animal, and, by this very moment of violence, he is brought into relationship with his imagined and known male ancestors, his friends and family, and the ecosystem of living things.  In each of these relationships, the hunter feels the weight of responsibility: to reduce suffering by all means possible, to preserve “timeless tradition,” to provision food, to contribute to homeostatic ecosystems.  Violence is thus at once something to be limited and something to be rejoiced for what it makes possible. 

Indeed, as r/Hunting users make abundantly clear, although their practices rely upon violence, they express a more honest relationship to and seek to reduce it.  Time and again, hunters point to the abject suffering animals endure due to factory farming, the source of almost all meat non-hunters eat, as well as to the distance factory farming puts between the cause of the violence (the consumer) and the moments of violence they cause.  We omnivorous non-hunters, they argue, produce more suffering in each animal we kill and live aloof to–if not in outright denial of–the responsibility we bear for that suffering.  Indeed, we never even see meat as an animal: we buy filets and steaks divorced from any animalian form that would suggest the tissue had ever been alive in the first place, had lived a short and terrible life.

A sincere engagement with the conversations on r/Hunting exposes men confronting their ambivalent relationship to violence, including as an activator of intimate relationships.  Even more, it forces consideration of the violence that structures not just our abstracted lives but the literal living bodies moving through them.  It also offers new ways to think about how men use social media platforms as alternative spaces of ethical and religious world-building while still attending to the ways in which these spaces house instances of intolerant or even hateful speech.