Neo-Darwinian Leisures, the Body and Nature: Hunting and Angling in Modernity

Against most social constructivist accounts of hunting this paper seeks to identify an embodied account of hunting and angling as a means of understanding its paradoxical popularity in late modernity. It evaluates the significance of two pro-hunting and angling discourses, those of Isaak Walton and Neo-Darwinian writers and argues that the appeal of hunting and angling, as evidenced through their copious literatures, descends from Walton rather than Neo-Darwinian sources. In particular it is the development of a highly sensual relation with the natural world that the Waltonian discourse encourages, in contrast with the visualism of touristic encounters, that may account for its enduring popularity.