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49 3 Hunting in Vermont Now In the next five chapters I will discuss a variety of different reasons why hunting is such a meaningful social practice in Vermont today. I start here with the broad overarching theme that has emerged from my ongoing research: the relationship of contemporary hunting to the everyday pressures of modern living. While the issues I talk about in this chapter (such as attachment to place and self-sufficiency) could very well be discussed outside of the framework of modernity, I believe this extra contextualization is important since it provides insight into the continued popularity of hunting in the twenty-first century. Because of the interplay of science and technology, international travel , global media connections, and capitalism that characterizes contemporary life in industrialized countries, many social theorists take it for granted that life today is extremely anxiety-provoking. Traditional religious and cultural explanations for worldly events are being challenged by modern “scientific” expertise that, in turn, is constantly being challenged by competing expert explanations. (Can somebody just tell me once and for all if eggs are bad for my heart?) Meanwhile, just as people are swimming—or maybe drowning—in modern ambivalence they are being presented with an unprecedented proliferation of choices about what to buy and how to live.1 The title of Anna Quindlen’s novel One True Thing always come to mind when I think about these things. What’s real in our lives; what is true? What can we depend on when the chips are down? Judging by the bloated self-help sections in bookstores, it seems that lots of Americans are having trouble looking in the mirror and answering these questions in a way they really believe. Although rural Vermonters might seem to be occupying a leafy island of tranquility in an ocean of modern turbulence, they are, nevertheless, Chapter Th ree 50 logging onto the same Web pages, watching the same television shows, enmeshed in the same global economy, paying off the same credit cards, and wrestling with the same modern dilemmas as any other American. So how, then, do the meanings of hunting in contemporary Vermont relate to these overarching conditions of modernity? This question is important not only for the intellectual purpose of trying to understand contemporary hunting from the perspective of hunters themselves, but also because for many antihunters the most fundamental and damaging critique of hunting is that it is unnecessary for survival in the modern industrialized world. From this viewpoint, hunting is a brutal anachronism that has long outlived its utility and leads to one simple and powerful question: Why? I hope to provide some answers to this and other Why questions, but I would also point out that these kinds of questions are not the focus of my work, since what I am trying to do is share my admittedly imperfect understanding of the meanings of hunting practices in Vermont today. Moreover, Why questions already assume that hunting is a morally suspect endeavor and, as such, they make a lot of sense to people who feel that hunting and modernity are strange bedfellows, but not much sense to those who don’t agree with this basic perspective on the characteristics of modern life. Historical Continuity and Community Through hunting, present-day actions are firmly embedded in the past and are imbued with a sense of perpetuity. The main reasons for this are the role of ancestors in the rural hunting community and the long-term relationship to specific landscapes that are forged through generations of hunting. As the sociological data show, most hunters come from hunting families. The skills of hunting are generally taught within families, being passed down from one generation to the next (Heberlein 1987). As a Middlebury farmer told me, “My father was a hunter and that’s where I learned it from.” Certainly children do not learn hunting in school. These days, in fact, it is increasingly criticized in school. Elders, then, are the most respected gatekeepers of valuable hunting wisdom, the real points of connection with the “old days,” and when it comes to hunters in Vermont the old days are thought of in glowing terms. Very often, then, old men are highly revered by younger men—even teenaged boys—for the wealth of knowledge that a lifetime of experience has given them. In this way, younger generations are constantly looking back to the past for guidance. [3.16.66.206] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 14:25...

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