The title of this book has two meanings. The first meaning of “Life as a Hunt” refers to Stuart Marks’s own life and signals the culmination of six decades of learning from African hunters. As a teenager of missionary parents in the Belgian Congo, Marks worked with hunters in the Kasai province as he collected museum specimens. Then, as a doctoral researcher in the 1960s, he began his engagement with Bisa hunters in the Luangwa Valley of Zambia. Arriving soon after decolonization and returning regularly over subsequent decades, he witnessed the gradual transition from game to wildlife management and from British to Zambian staff. The second meaning of “Life as a Hunt” signals this book’s focus on the quotidian experiences of Zambian hunters. It examines the interactions of generation of Luangwa Valley hunters with wildlife, technology, the state, and other members of their society. It delivers a broad historical narrative about wildlife as a resource. Chapters dedicated to biography and contemporary hunting practices humanize the controversy around “poaching.”
Life as a Hunt is dedicated to showing the changing social context and pressures around hunting practices. In recent decades those processes culminated in something that will seem counterintuitive to many: a disconnect between hunting practices and conservationist management policies purporting to be “community based.” Marks aims to disabuse readers of assumptions about the “community” in “community-based” conservation.
The first section of the book, “On Becoming, Being, and Staying Bisa,” throws the ethnographic and historical nets widely. Marks’s own archival research supplements published histories of colonial game management. “Game protection” was a colonial legacy, but so was the new technology of muzzle-loading guns, which became essential to hunters. This section of the book challenges colonial and international discourses that might suggest backwardness among the Bisa people. Passages drawn from Marks’s field notes reconstruct the hunters’ moral universe of hierarchies and obligations. Spirits were powerful, but rituals could manage them and mitigate danger from animals. Through elaborate negotiations and skilled bushcraft, Bisa hunters protected the community and provided it with bushmeat.
For all of the transformation in colonial Northern Rhodesia and during the early period of Zambian independence, the most disruptive developments in Bisa hunting come after 1980, when the combination of economic downturn, an interventionist state, conservationist interests, and ever-dangerous animals increased the insecurity to hunters. Not only did foreign conceptions about wildlife protection render historic hunting practices illegal, but the enforcement of protection in “community”-based conservation was often corrupt and violent. Increasing surveillance and restrictions on guns resulted in an increase in snaring, an illegal but silent technique that allowed hunters to continue their work.
The second section of the book, “On the Quest for Local Sustainability,” approaches the most recent period through several themes. Chapter 5 narrates a century of change in hunting practices through the lives of six individual men over three generations. The stories convey that the old ways of hunting required consideration and placation of spirits. The new ways added lucrative illegal markets and corrupt game guards to the mix. Chapter 6 presents Marks’s experiences on two hunting excursions and reveals expert practices in minute-by-minute detail. Chapter 7 works through quantitative data collected during fieldwork from1988 to 1990. We see how the choice of prey is made with the awareness of possible interdiction by the state and the demands of kinfolk. The buffalo is an especially valuable species to both conservationists and hunters, and thus Marks returns to it frequently. These chapters show that hunting involves negotiations with the supernatural, human, and ecological realms.
The final chapters directly address the controversy around “poaching” through an exploration of the social history of guns and snares and the moral economy of bushmeat. In explaining how snares became the favored technique and how unregulated and unsustainable hunting became so prevalent, Marks is unyielding in his critique of current policies. Both the laws and their implementation have increased poverty and depleted the local heritage because hunters must hide their knowledge.
The last section of the book, “The Challenge of Decreasing Entitlements,” has only one chapter that essentially revisits themes of previous chapters. Here, as in some previous chapters of this long book, the commentary on the rich ethnographic data might have been condensed.
Life as a Hunt was produced with the humane intention of documenting vanishing practices, calling out disastrous interventions into historic life ways, and contributing to efforts to reform policy. Marks provides a wealth of material that leads the reader through many facets of Bisa society. The greatest value of the book lies in the middle chapters focused directly on hunting practices and featuring the conclusions Marks drew from his own fieldwork. Environmental historians and policymakers should pay attention to these lessons.
