To Feed or not to Feed is not a Question: Hunter-farmers in Metabolic Environment of Central-European Monoculture

On 20 May 2025 Ludek Broz gave an invited lecture at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology titled ‘To Feed or not to Feed is not a Question: Hunter-farmers in Metabolic Environment of Central-European Monoculture’

Abstract

In many parts of the world hunting is understood as capture and killing of free roaming wild animals that are, up to the moment they are hunted, self-sufficiently living of the land. In contrast to that ideal, game animals in the Czech Republic are regularly fed by hunters, which is not only a common practice but in the ‘time of need’ even legal requirement. This talk uses the comparison with South-West Siberia to look at why, how, when and where Czech hunters deliver feed to their (potential) prey. It is structured into three sections according to local categories that distinguish complementary feeding, distractive feeding and baiting. Showing how wild boar features in each of them, in contrast with other game animal species, enables to expose the practice of hunting as complexly nested in metabolic environments of post-socialist industrialized monoculture, while recognising both, the effective and affective dimensions of feeding and how the two translate into the identity of the hunter and the prey-to-be.