Conservation dressed in camouflage: Neoliberal environmentality and the hunting industry

Abstract

Understanding dynamics around the neoliberalization of conservation is an important direction within current scholarly research. In this paper, we contribute to these discussions by examining how companies within the hunting industry engage in practices that are reflective of neoliberal environmentality. We conduct a Foucauldian discourse analysis of four companies’ websites to interrogate what discourses of technology companies promote to hunters and anglers, how they mobilize these discourses, and how these discourses function to reproduce wildlife conservation-minded subjects and maintain particular beliefs, identities, and practices about both wildlife conservation and conservationists that uphold state conservation objectives. Through our discourse analysis, we find that companies within the hunting industry construct hunter/angler wildlife conservation-minded subjects by educating consumers, legitimizing trophy animals, using identity politics, positioning technology as a conservation(ist’s) tool, and through wearing camouflage. Subsequently, we argue these companies present a view of wildlife conservation that problematically privileges neoliberal values, trophy animals, and exclusionary politics, illustrating how discourses of technology function to obscure such issues. Examinations of environmentality must therefore more explicitly consider discursive absences and other hidden aspects of conservation as well as potential consequences of failing to address oversights.