Biltong Hunting as a Performance of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Rifling through Nature analyzes landscape, hunting, identity, and belonging by examining the staging of biltong hunting on wildlife ranches in South Africa. It examines how hunting landscapes have become sites where formerly dominant white settler masculinity can perform rootedness and belonging vis-a-vis its loss of political power.

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Since the early 1990s, the seventeen-fold growth in South African sport hunting has made the South African wildlife ranching industry the sixth largest contributor to South Africa’s agricultural sector, bringing in $680 million per annum. Biltong Hunting as a Performance of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa links biltong hunting’s rapid growth to the 1990s disassembly of the apartheid state and analyzes how the hierarchy, and belonging that biltong hunters associate with it, emerges anew in the post-apartheid context. It examines the narrative and embodied strategies employed by hunters and farmers to create a space that naturalizes the mythic Afrikaner nationalist past in the post-apartheid present.