Hunting ghosts: on spectacles of spectrality and the trophy animal

Abstract

In lieu of material encounters, nonhuman spectres are made sense of through spectacles, imageries speculated upon with their own geographies and affects. This paper explores histories of trophy hunting in the Spanish Pyrenees, illustrating the emergence of the spectacular in relation to contemporary ideals of nature for hunters, in particular questioning the material implications of hunting for the extinction of the bucardo (or Pyrenean ibex). Theoretically, this paper converses Jacques Derrida’s metaphor of spectrality and Guy Debord’s conceptualisation of the spectacle to understand how hunting ghost animals removes them from particular ecological contexts. Trophy hunting and taxidermic practice serves to produce spectacles of animals at the interface of life and death, detaching them from temporal linearities, and allowing trophy animals to speak to broader sentiments of mastery over landscape. The bucardo was a ghostly figure prior to its extinction, famously difficult to encounter and kill by the 19th century, and as such its absence was marked through trophies to infer its broader presence in the landscape. I trace the changing significances of spectres and spectacles through the development of photographic technologies; prior to the camera’s spread and widespread use, spectral spectacles were produced through hunting practice. A typology is offered for the sensing of ghosts in their cultural contexts: mourning, or the attempt to ontologise remains; marking, or the conditional attribution of language to the spectral; and working, the means through which the ghost transforms itself or is transformed.

Postextinction Geographies: Audiovisual Afterlives of the Bucardo and the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

“…Animal traces are found in traditional archives—bugs squashed between pages, animals in correspondence—or outside—animals have left traces written in landscapes, architecture, cultures, and ecologies (see, e.g., Lorimer 2006 ; Benson 2011 ; Oliver 2021 ; Searle 2021 ; Bersaglio and Margulies 2022 ). Taking animal traces and their persistent relevance seriously is our methodological approach to tell deliberately endless stories of and with the dead (see Lorimer 2019; Despret 2021d ).…”

Spectral ecologies: De/extinction in the Pyrenees

“…Bucardo were hunted to extinction (Acevedo & Cassinello, 2009; Crampe, 2020; García‐González & Herrero, 1999; García‐González & Margalida, 2014; Woutersen, 2000, 2012). They were considered one of Europe’s most important trophy animals by the 19th century, valued above all for their horns, attracting recreational hunters from France and Britain in search of an animal that was infamously ghostly and difficult to encounter (Searle, 2021). By the early 20th century, hunting pressures had reduced the bucardo’s range to its last refuge in the Ordesa valley, nestled in the high altitudes of the Spanish Pyrenees, a stone’s throw from the French border (Cabrera, 1911, 1914).…”

“…McCorristine and Adams illustrate that not only do hauntings of past extinctions have palpable and material consequences for the practices of conservation, they also present de‐extinction as a “critical context for further debates about how absence and presence perform work in conservation and how cultural geographers might deal with the language and practice of ’bringing back the dead’ in a more‐than‐human world” (2020, p. 111). Recently, more‐than‐human spectrality has garnered considerable attention in the cultural geographies of biotic loss and recovery (Bastian, 2020; Bersaglio & Margulies, 2021; Fredriksen, 2021; Garlick, 2019; Jørgensen, 2016; Lorimer, 2020; Searle, 2020, 2021; Symons & Garlick, 2020; Toso et al, 2020; Wrigley, 2020). For Ben Garlick and Kate Symons, “geographies after extinction are haunted geographies” (2020, p. 132) that provoke new affective activities, relations, and attachments (Garlick, 2019).…”

“…Whilst conducting ethnographic work at a hunting fair in Aragón, for example, many hunters told me with pride that Donald Trump Jr was in Spain at the time pursuing ibex trophies. Bucardo were historically favoured over Iberian ibex as trophies for two reasons: their horns were more spectacular, and they were considerably rarer, spectral (Searle, 2021). Andrea, an environmental activist, told me that the financial backing from the hunting federation of Aragón “says it all; hunters just wanted the big horns back.” The hunters in Spain whom I interviewed seemed to generally support cloning, despite mostly acknowledging the improbability of ever being able to hunt bucardo – or introduced ibex in the Pyrenees for that matter.…”

“…Ecosystems are haunted by extinctions – many of which are unseen, unknown, or uncharismatic (Lorimer, 2007). There is a clear bias in my account that attends to the ghosts of an emblematic and spectacular animal (Searle, 2021); moving forward, geographers should seek to elucidate scarcer more‐than‐human spectres.…”