Paper short abstract:

This paper uses photography to explore hunting practices and networks of forest encounters in Arjeplog, Sweden. Hunters imagine a symbiotic coexistence with the forest, and they position this as antithetical to Stockholm in discourses of resource use, climate change and sustainability.

Paper long abstract:

This highly visual paper explores how moose hunting practices in Northern Sweden activate relations across intertwining networks: hunter-animal, person-forest, and ultimately rural-urban in discourses of climate change and sustainability. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Arjeplog, this paper uses extensive photographic imagery alongside traditional anthropological methods. I first examine how local hunters imagine the wild moose meat as being 'of the forest,' therefore natural and clean for the body. I discuss further how person and forest forge a reciprocal relationship: the hunters aid the growth of the forest through keeping the moose populations to a sustainable level, and being 'in nature' means they are motivated to keep the forest clean. Thus, the hunt is imagined as the means to both bodily wellbeing and to the future of the forest in a symbiotic network - what I argue is bodily and moral personhood in relation to the trees. Finally, these networks are actively engaged in reinforcing rural-urban division. Locals with whom I worked positioned their emplaced practices as antithetical with Stockholm in national discourses of resources, climate change and sustainability. These relations in and of the forest thus constitute alternative possibilities for sustainable coexistence among my participants. Photo-elicitation allowed a collaborative exploration of landscape during fieldwork, and the images work here to visualise these networks and complicate the nature/culture divide in the forests of Arjeplog.