Appropriate Targets

Florence Durney

doi:10.3167/ares.2020.110104

Abstract

With the International Whaling Commission’s 1982 moratorium on commercial whaling in force, much of today’s cetacean hunting is done by traditional or indigenous communities for subsistence use. However, many communities continue to face pressure from other global stakeholders to stop. Informed by my research with marine hunters in Indonesia, this article combines scholarship from biology, philosophy, and law with global anthropology on cetacean hunting groups to explore a set of recurring arguments arising between hunting communities, management and conservation bodies, and publics. These include the role of charismatic species in Western imagination and conservation; how understandings of animal sentience determine acceptable prey; disputes about the authenticity of and control over traditional hunting practice; and the entanglement of cultural sovereignty and rights to animal resources. Bringing these arguments together allows for an examination of how the dominant global discourse about traditional whaling is shaped and how it affects extant hunting communities.

Highlights

With the International Whaling Commission’s 1982 moratorium on commercial whaling in force, much of today’s cetacean hunting is done by traditional or indigenous communities for subsistence use
Since 2010, the community of Lamalera has been engaged in what has become a regional, national, and international struggle about their hunting practices. Both the Alaska and the Indonesia incidents are emblematic of a struggle over discourse and practice between traditional hunters and anti-whaling stakeholders that has been unfolding since the 1970s and 1980s, a period that saw the implementation of a global moratorium on cetacean hunting from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in response to crashing cetacean populations
Kalland (1993) argues the Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling (ASW) designation has forced indigenous groups to come before the IWC and argue for their own “primitiveness.” the current position of the IWC regarding ASW, and the way the definition has come to intersect with the broader public discourse of anti-whaling advocates, has resulted in a situation where indigenous and traditional marine hunters are required to hunt and to live in an imagined past, rather than being free to construct a “traditional future” (Reid 2015)

Summary

KEYWORDS

In April 2017, a 16-year-old Yupik boy harpooned his first whale, an event that would normally be met with excitement as a major rite of passage in his community of Gambell, Alaska. Informed by my own ethnographic research with traditional marine hunters in Indonesia, this article explores a set of recurring arguments that have arisen from the interactions between hunting communities, management and conservation bodies, and publics To do so, it brings together scholarship on traditional and indigenous cetacean hunting groups across the globe with topical contributions from anthropology, philosophy, biology, policy, and law. Hunters in Lamalera cooperatively hunt for a number of cetaceans, most notably sperm whales, as well as large pelagic fish, sharks, and rays Comparing these two cases with those groups that do currently sit under the ASW umbrella brings to the fore the most pressing points of the discourse on traditional and indigenous cetacean hunting globally and forcefully illustrates their impact on communities. It should be noted that many traditional and indigenous communities that hunt cetaceans hunt marine species that are more regionally bounded (e.g., seals in the Arctic) and are facing a broader struggle in relation to their lifeways as hunters. First, I give a brief historical overview of cetacean hunting and of the IWC before pivoting to examine the four aforementioned areas of discourse

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Conclusion