Interdisciplinary Network for the Compilation of a “Companion to Cultural Studies in Hunting”

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Maurice Saß
• Subject Area: Art History ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517690515

Hunting has always been one of the important cultural techniques by means of which binary hierarchies have been created, promoted and preserved: between man and animal, civilization and wilderness, self and foreign, male and female, white and black, noble and bourgeois, etc. Not only hunting practices but also their artistic and discursive representations have significantly participated in this creation of difference - and do so till today. The controversial nature of hunting and its hierarchical implications is illustrated and explored by a large number of studies from various disciplines and also frequently surfaces in heated public debates concerning, for instance, hunting laws, animal ethics or wildlife management. There is, however, a lack of comprehensive studies taking into account the interdependence between the many complex ways in which hunting practices in European Cultural History have participated in and perpetuated the creation of difference. This is where the proposed interdisciplinary network comes in. It has a threefold goal: 1. to establish an interdisciplinary research discourse on hunting and, for the first time, to bring the historical-critical perspectives of disciplinary studies that have so far been isolated in a dialogue that encompasses different regions and epochs as well as artistic and cultural modes of representation (from the Middle Ages to the present, in Europe and its 'contact zones', with a focus on texts, images, objects and architecture); 2. to establish an intersectional approach and link the study of the many hierarchizations (especially along categories such as 'race', class, gender and animality) which have mostly been treated separately from each other; 3. to comprehensively combine the study of the factual history of hunting with the history of its semantics as well as their interdependences, and to thereby promote a cultural studies perspective. To achieve these goals, the network will compile a companion which, for the first time, offers a systematic presentation of the cultural history of hunting from post-classical Europe till today. On the one hand, this companion is destined to serve as a central reference work for scholars from areas such as ecocriticism, court and nobility research or social history. On the other hand, the handbook will test a variety of inter- and transdisciplinary approaches and thus make their importance for studies in hunting obvious. In doing so, the project is striving to overcome the currently widespread premise in hunting studies that there are hunts whose purpose lies in the activity of hunting itself, or hunts that are purely metaphorical (such as the hunt for love or knowledge). The aim is to establish a new methodological standard for future research as it stresses the necessity to take into account the interplay of factual and symbolic effects of hunting and puts the importance of an intersectional as well as interdisciplinary perspective to the test.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Laura Elisabeth Beck