Garry Marvin

A passionate pursuit: foxhunting as performance

Early in the morning a farmer, dressed in dull green and brown work clothes, a dog at his side, leaves his house and walks quietly along a hedgerow towards a wood. At the edge of the wood he takes two cartridges from his pocket and puts them into his shot gun. He removes the safety catch. With the gun ready he continues slowly and quietly along the edge of the wood—an unobtrusive presence in the landscape. All of his senses alert, his eyes scan the near distance. He is not interested in the occasional pheasant that flaps out of the trees and into the field, nor the rabbits feeding along the hedgerows. His aim, if his aim is true, is to shoot one of the local foxes that might turn their attention to his poultry or lambs.

English Foxhunting: A Prohibited Practice

In 2005 foxhunting was prohibited by an act of parliament in England. The Hunting Act 2004 forbade the highly formal and ritualized hunting of foxes with packs of hounds and thus brought to an end a practice that had been present in the countryside for some 200 years. In this article I explore the complexities of foxhunting as a social and cultural practice prior to the ban as well as the nature of the ban as it relates to killing foxes. I then explore the effects of the ban in terms of how, from the perspectives of the supporters of foxhunting, it is experienced as an attack on cherished notions of community, rural life, belonging, and connectivity with the countryside. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I would like to thank Captain Brian Fanshawe and Captain Rupert Inglesant for their invaluable suggestions. I would also like to thank Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, who still has the patience to read drafts and unpick muddled thinking and writing.

Out of Asia: The Singular Case of the Barbary Macaque

The Barbary macaque (Macaca sylvanus) is the only species of the genus Macaca living outside Asia. Currently, two disjointed and highly fragmented populations of this species exist in the wild, in Morocco and Algeria. The Barbary macaque is listed as endangered in the IUCN 2010 Red List of Threatened Species and the total population size in the wild is estimated at between 5,000 and 6,000 individuals. Outside Africa, a free-ranging population of macaques inhabits the Rock of Gibraltar. The Barbary macaque can be considered a flagship species of the cedar and oak forests of Morocco and Algeria. Despite this, little is known about the population structure, ecology and behaviour of wild Barbary macaques. Scarce data exist on the effect of human activity on the conservation and behaviour of this species. In this chapter, we review the literature on wild Barbary macaques to describe their ecology and behaviour. We discuss the factors threatening the survival of this species, and the history of human-macaque interactions in Morocco and Algeria, as well as in Gibraltar. Moreover, we analyse the effect of tourist pressure on the behaviour of the Barbary macaque at our field site in the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco, as a case study of human-macaque interactions.

The Art of Fierceness

Since the early eighteenth century events have been staged in Spain in which professional teams of men perform with, and kill, bulls in urban spaces, originally in closed-off town squares and later in purpose-built arenas, in front of an audience: the Spanish bullfight.1 However, the term ‘bullfight’ wrongly suggests a sport in which men and bulls engage with each other in aggressive, physical, bodily combat. For the human performers and the audience the event is not a fight and it is not a sport. For them the processes of the encounters in the arena are regarded as an art, toreo — an art that has a set of aesthetics peculiar to it and to no other event. The relationship between man and bull does begin as a contest, a struggle of the assertion of different wills, powers, strengths and influences, but, ideally, this contest should become resolved into a partnership of performance expressed as an elegant fusion of the movements of the two: a performance improvised at the moment of its enactment.

Book Review: Rhoda M. Wilkie, Livestock/Deadstock: Working with Farm Animals from Birth to Slaughter

by devoting a chapter to the exit routes women take out of exotic dance. These include a change of career, relocation, partnerships, pregnancy and childbirth, dismissal and psychological strain. Colosi also notes that many who exit exotic dance return to it. She compares the emotions dancers expressed when leaving Starlets as ‘reminiscent of the emotional reactions produced after the breakdown of a close personal relationship’ (p. 143). Dirty Dancing is a richly textured ethnographic study useful in a wide range of sociology, anthropology and women’s studies courses. It is readable, methodologically rigorous, and situated within a formidable body of scholarship. However, in addition to its contribution as a new piece of scholarship for students and researchers, Dirty Dancing is perhaps most valuable in its policy implications. To clarify, that women report positive elements working as exotic dancers is not a new finding (see Barton, 2002, 2006; Price, 2000). What is new in Colosi’s work is what it allows one to make some deductions about the potential role a state can play in improving the conditions of exotic dancing. For example, unlike Americans, British citizens have access to national health care. This safety net immediately reduces one of the risks associated with exotic dancing in the USA: working in a job with no benefits. Further, I believe the UK state-wide regulation limiting contact between dancers and customers has the added benefit of improving working conditions for dancers because it reduces a competitive upping the ante of dancer/customer interactions that simultaneously forces dancers to engage in more sexual acts while driving prices down. In these ways, findings from Dirty Dancing empirically support the proposition that a combination of greater worker control coupled with state-sponsored policies that mediate economic inequality and limit contact between dancers and customers, positively affects women working as exotic dancers.