A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History [Hardcover]

Matt Cartmill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1993

What brought the ape out of the trees, and so the man out of the ape, was a taste for blood. This is how the story went, when a few fossils found in Africa in the 1920s seemed to point to hunting as the first human activity among our simian forebears-the force behind our upright posture, skill with tools, domestic arrangements, and warlike ways. Why, on such slim evidence, did the theory take hold? In this engrossing book Matt Cartmill searches out the origins, and the strange allure, of the myth of Man the Hunter. An exhilarating foray into cultural history, A View to a Death in the Morning shows us how hunting has figured in the western imagination from the myth of Artemis to the tale of Bambi-and how its evolving image has reflected our own view of ourselves.

A leading biological anthropologist, Cartmill brings remarkable wit and wisdom to his story. Beginning with the killer--ape theory in its postWorld War II version, he takes us back through literature and history to other versions of the hunting hypothesis. Earlier accounts of Man the Hunter, drafted in the Renaissance, reveal a growing uneasiness with humanity's supposed dominion over nature. By delving further into the history of hunting, from its promotion as a maker of men and builder of character to its image as an aristocratic pastime, charged with ritual and eroticism, Cartmill shows us how the hunter has always stood between the human domain and the wild, his status changing with cultural conceptions of that boundary.

Cartmill's inquiry leads us through classical antiquity and Christian tradition, medieval history, Renaissance thought, and the Romantic movement to the most recent controversies over wilderness management and animal rights. Modern ideas about human dominion find their expression in everything from scientific theories and philosophical assertions to Disney movies and sporting magazines. Cartmill's survey of these sources offers fascinating insight into the significance of hunting as a mythic metaphor in recent times, particularly after the savagery of the world wars reawakened grievous doubts about man's place in nature.

A masterpiece of humanistic science, A View to a Death in the Morning is also a thoughtful meditation on what it means to be human, to stand uncertainly between the wilderness of beast and prey and the peaceable kingdom. This richly illustrated book will captivate readers on every side of the dilemma, from the most avid hunters to their most vehement opponents to those who simply wonder about the import of hunting in human nature.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Does the killer instinct exist in all humans? Is there a moral boundary between people and beasts? Cartmill, a professor of biological anthropology at Duke University and author of Human Structure (HUP, 1987), here moves from the killer-ape theories of early 20th-century anthropology to popular conceptions from Greek mythology to medieval ritual to the present, ranging nimbly through art, literature, biology, anthropology, scientific theories, and Disney movies in support of his arguments. He examines both hunting as a metaphor and the changing concepts of nature throughout much of Western history and culture. Anyone interested in the role and value of hunting--whether in support or opposition--will find a broad and scholarly source of information on the influences shaping the way we think about this emotionally charged topic. The extensive notes and bibliography make this volume particularly appropriate for academic and large public libraries.
- Roland Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

There is every reason to believe that animal rights will become increasingly central to our political discourse in the next century. As this issue moves toward center stage, A View to a Death in the Morning will figure prominently...A razor-sharp analysis that succeeds in raising doubts about deeply rooted and widely shared assumptions concerning the position of human beings in nature. (Robert Rydell Science )

In graceful prose, infused with wit, irony, and asides that lend unexpected and sometimes poignant relevance to his discussion, Cartmill tells an evocative story of human ambivalence about hunting and our relationship to the animals we kill and sometimes eat...This book is a marvelous piece of social history on a topic of wide significance. (Bruce Winterhalder American Scientist )

[A] splendid book...A View to a Death in the Morning shows both past and present to be a lot more complicated than the slogans of simplistic ideologues. (Betty Ann Kevles Los Angeles Times )

A stunning survey of society's attitudes toward hunting from classical literature through, inevitably, the greatest anti-hunting event of all time, the release of Walt Disney's Bambi...What [this book] does, with a breadth of literary scholarship and analysis that is most unusual in academic science, is trace society's ambivalence and polarization about hunting from classical Greece...through Rome...and on to the present day...Cartmill's consistent theme--which ties each era, each society, each viewpoint, together in a satisfying text--is his focus on a society's understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature itself. (M. R. Montgomery Boston Globe )

This book is an elegant, erudite, stimulating essay on the history of Western ideas about humans and nature. (Adam Kuper Nature )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 347 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1ST edition (May 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067493735X
• ISBN-13: 978-0674937352
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,169,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good history of the anti-hunting movement, January 26, 2000

By 

Daniel E. Platt (New York State) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (Paperback)

The book explores many of the questions of hunting and anti-hunting. It spends a surprising amount of time considering the question of whether human evolution was driven by hunting (perhaps because that has been one of the justifications for the continuation of hunting traditions), as well as a review of the emergence of anti-hunting themes and the animal rights movement. It makes an obvious error in the interpretation of Leupold's statement in the assignment of rights in the discussion of Leupold's land ethic. The point of the book is to develop arguments against many of the current justifications for hunting, and for the emergence of the notion of animal rights. It does not do a very good job of describing the current hunting ethic in the US, nor does it describe the rather complex gradiations in that population.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hunting as an Institution: Fascinating, March 25, 2006

By 

Whitney Hampson "radical history nerd" (Indiana, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (Paperback)

True to its subtitle, biological anthropologist Matt Cartmill's book A View to a Death in the Morning is as much about human opinions of nature as it is about attitudes towards hunting. In an effort to better understand why the hunting hypothesis of human origins has frequently been accepted despite relatively scant evidence to support it, Cartmill traces changes in the way Western societies have conceptualized hunting and explores how hunting informs the human-animal boundary. He reveals that this relationship between humans and hunting often mirrors our relationships with nature and with other humans.

To understand hunting in the modern world, argues Cartmill, one must understand it on a symbolic level. Even the word "hunting" has specific cultural meanings, and because it by definition involves "wildness," it often "marks the edge of the human world" (36). The book opens and closes with discussions of the modern ideas about hunting, including the early failure and later success of the hunting hypothesis and a detailed analysis of the anti-hunting message in Bambi. Through this and the history of hunting that comprises the middle, Cartmill argues that the way we see hunting is influenced by class and political tensions, our relationship with nature, and beliefs about the nature and potential of humans. He maintains that in today's world, although we persist in policing the animal-human boundary, it is becoming more difficult to view animals as "a series of means to human ends" (223).

Cartmill argues that there was a transition from an earlier conception of nature as demonic and disobedient to a more modern understanding of nature as holy and idyllic. Ancient Greece associated hunting with warfare (an idea which persists even today). But as hunting increasingly became a privilege of the elite in the Middle Ages, two different class-based attitudes towards hunting emerged, with lower peasant masses associating hunting with rebellion and freedom and the aristocracy seeing it as a display of manners and status. With the Enlightenment, the natural world became seen as a machine under the increasing control of humans. This was given more support with the advent of Darwin's evolutionary theory, which justified the dominion of (wealthy white) men, masters of both savages and big game. This view of hunting, he argues, is closely linked with imperialism and white supremacy.

The book also traces many of the modern anti-hunting movements. Humanist doubts about the power of humans over nature interacted with class tensions to create early anti-hunting rhetoric in late medieval Europe. Seventeenth-century philosophical and religious thinkers saw animal suffering as an immoral consequence of hunting; two hundred years later, European humane societies sought political action against this suffering, though sometimes not without a class bias. But perhaps the most enduring tradition, argues Cartmill, has been Romanticism, who saw nature as a sacred place unsullied by human contact and hunters as enemies of the animal kingdom, and in which lay the roots of a broad cultural critique of progress and European supremacy as well as late twentieth-century political movements.

Cartmill's book is comprehensive and well-organized. He addresses equally well broad changes and detailed case studies, showing the many ways in which hunting has served as a symbol. He echoes many themes that Coates introduced, such as the nature-is-evil/nature-is-holy ideological change. One aspect I felt was lacking was an analysis of the importance of gender, particularly how hunting has been a critical component of defining and proving masculinity; although he occasionally brings up gender, it is usually regards to nature as feminine (i.e., hunting equals rape), rather than an analysis of hunting and hunters. But this is a minor critique. Overall, the book is a comprehensive and compelling exploration of the complexities of the institution of hunting.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant but Uneven, June 21, 2004

By 

Jeffrey (Clinton, CT, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (Paperback)

The first several chapters of this book are an intellectual tour de force of absolutely wonderful writing about science, literature, and culture. For anyone interested in hunting, pro or con, this is a must-read. The last chapter, however, takes an amazingly demagogic and unreasoned turn. Cartmill reinscribes most of the same paradigms that he so brilliantly critiques in the chapters leading up to the final one. Seeing two poachers dressing a fawn by the side of a road, he treats them as representative examples of hunters; without so much as a nod at the distinction between poaching and hunting, he goes on to say that this incident is what motivates his personal anti-hunting sentiments. But most hunters would be similarly disgusted with the acts of the two men--there are law enforcement programs making it easy to turn in poachers and hunters themselves are the ones who usually do so. Also, Cartmill quotes a "Buck Peterson" book on deer hunting as though it were a serious discussion of hunting ethics, when it is in fact a joke book (one that most real hunters would, again, find in very bad taste). The pure emotion that drives both sides of this argument is apparently capable of blinding even a first-class intellect such as Cartmill's.