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Paper short abstract

The study examines the 'hunting fire' as a narrative and a material figure in the Anthropocene. Drawing upon ethnographic data, it offers a nuanced interpretation of fire as a instrument, demonstrating its role in mediating between care, danger and pleasure.

Paper long abstract

Recent years have seen an increase in the number of female hunters in Germany. A comprehensive set of data has been collated through a series of interviews, participant observations and a thorough analysis of social media posts. This has enabled the identification of a diverse array of everyday hunting activities. In this paper, the 'hunting fire' is discussed as both a narrative and a material figure of the elemental in the Anthropocene. Drawing upon an extensive ethnographic corpus pertaining to the subject of hunts in northwestern Germany, this study examines in detail the intricate relationship between fire and the emotional dimensions inherent to the transformation of fire into a hunting implement. Although fire is presented as a primordial element in classical elemental teachings, in the context of hunting, it takes on a mechanised and controlled form, yet remains inherently unpredictable, thus entwining life and death. The 'hunting fire' thus marks a node that trancends humanistic ways of thinking: it constitutes subjectivations of both the hunters and the hunted animals and opens up interaction processes between human and non-human actors. It is evident that the fundamental act of discharging a firearm, when regarded an integral part of hunting and simultaneously legitimised by safety discourses, evinces an ambivalent oscillation between care, danger and pleasure ('hunting fever'). The presentation proposes an analysis of the hunting fire as a contaminated, cultural-natural element in the Anthropocene, which opens up new approaches of analysing power, affect and materiality in human-environmental relations.