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The social media site Reddit allows users to create individual communities, called subreddits, devoted to any topic–from TV shows to users’ nude photos to religious communities–where its subscribers can post links, comments, pictures, or other media. One of these subreddits, r/Hunting, offers hunting enthusiasts opportunity to post photos of equipment, kills, or sentimental moments with fellow hunters; discuss issues affecting hunters; and more. Through discourse analysis of comment threads on the subreddit, my paper seeks to uncover the reflexive ethical and religious world-building hunters do. Importantly, the moment of violence in the hunt both creates an intimate relationship between the hunter and the harvest animal and makes real to the hunter several other nodes of intimacy.
This paper therefore lays bare the ambivalences of violence for hunters, uncovering its multivalence. The kill, euphemized by hunters on r/Hunting as “the harvest,” brings the hunter into intimate relationship with the harvest animal and, by this very moment of violence, with his imagined and known ancestors, his friends and family, and the ecosystem of living things.[1] 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, though their practices rely upon violence, they express a more honest relationship to violence as they aim 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 non-hunter omnivores, they argue, not only produce more suffering in each animal we kill, but also live aloof to the responsibility we bear for that suffering. Indeed, we never even see meat as an animal: we buy steaks and cutlets 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 reckoning with the conversations on r/Hunting thus forces consideration of the violence that structures not just our abstracted lives but the literal living bodies moving through them, as well as the other animals subject to our practices.
To get at these questions, my paper takes the lead of r/Hunting users, analyzing 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 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 analysis. 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 therefore 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 the ability of the initial moment of violence, which connects hunter with harvest animal, to triangulate hunters into three temporal-spatial networks of relationships: the agnatic line of their ancestors (a chain), their living kin (a web), and all living things (a matrix). Even more, hunting gives them occasion to reflect on and theorize the meanings of these relationships. Hunting as ritual is also disciplinary. Technical mastery in hunting–from the ability to sit 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. Hunting implements and practices discipline ethical comportment into the practitioner, transforming them from a mere sadistic killer of animals into a compassionate hunter. 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. 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.
Attention to the conversations on r/Hunting thus reveals unseen ways a group known for their relationship to violence–often reviled for it–think complexly and reflexively about the entanglements among violence, compassion, love, and suffering. It also points us to the role contemporary foodways insulate everyday Americans from either the responsibility they bear for violence or a reckoning with its ambivalences.
[1] Note: I have struggled continuously with the decision of how to gender hunters in this paper. The ambivalent anonymity of Reddit makes determinations about things like gender relatively straightforward for some users, difficult for others, outright impossible for still others. This paper both acknowledges the gendered nature of spaces like Reddit and r/Hunting specifically, as well as of hunting itself, while also refusing to cede to men exclusive access to the gender of the abstracted hunter. Still, not calling attention to gender–like supposed “colorblindness” in race–is insidiously naïve to the experience of gender for non-male hunters.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
Through a net ethnography of the r/Hunting subreddit on the social media website Reddit, I uncover the intricate ways white settler hunters imagine themselves in intimate relationships to human and non-human animals because of the violence they enact on their kills. For hunters on r/hunting, the moment of violence–euphemized as “harvesting”–is at once the point, and superfluous to it, serving as both the node of intimacy with the harvest animal as well as a necessary evil to be necessarily minimized: true hunting, they argue, is about limiting suffering–anything else is just sadistic killing. Indeed, this moment of violence, I show, anchors ethical scaffolding as well as religious cosmologies. Hunting, then–even white settler hunting–is the implicitly intimate moment where violence meets compassion, where life meets life, where humans are honest about the death they bring into the world.