„Pojedziemy na łów…” Polowania a przemoc symboliczna
“A hunting we will go…” Hunting in the Context of Symbolic Violence

Author(s): Dobrosława Wężowicz‑Ziółkowska
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: hunting; symbolic violence; cultural reproduction; habitus;masculine dominance;
Summary/Abstract: The text examines the issue of hunting and its endurance in the context of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence. The author proposes that democratic society’s current consent on ruthless and unnecessary killings of animals in the wilderness is a result of the dominance of masculine narratives and grand aristocratic narrative, which has been shaping the cultural heritage for centuries, constructing the role of the noble hunter. As a result of symbolic violence, this image is subconsciously validated and aesthetisized, whereas actual suffering of animals killed during the hunting is absent from the system of meanings constructed by the hunters’ narrative and rejected by its inheritors. The suffering of animals has not been represented in the cultural capital of the dominant group, whose aim was to promote the triumph of the hunter, not individual subjective pain of the killed animal. The article as well opens a discussion concerning hunting in the context of Rene Girard’s theory of the mimetic desire and Richard Dawkins’ memetic theory, underlining the necessity to consider hunting in a perspective broader that the one offered by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence.

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