ABSTRACT
The antiquity and ubiquity of hunting is everywhere acknowledged. Feminist anthropologists have been especially keen to demolish the myth of 'Man the hunter', because of its apparent naturalisation of gender dualisms and hierarchies in 'the male-centred hunting story', as Donna Haraway puts it. In Robert Ardrey's words, hunting conferred upon humans momentous and irrevocable consequences, making the human being a truly 'cultural animal', though this very path-dependence makes humans 'biological prisoners of cultural advances'. For many critics of the hunting hypothesis, many feminists amongst them, the history of hunting needs to be taken away from 'nature'. The hunting hypothesis continues to be extraordinarily influential. Despite the greater contribution of women to the world of hunting in different times and places, hunting in history is disproportionately a male and a masculine pastime. Hunting has become iconic of an immersion with the natural world, an alternative to the 'great dualist machineries' of anthropocentric logic and culture.
