How do moose experience the double hermeneutic?

Abstract

ABSTRACTBy blending an environmental history of moose in Nova Scotia with an institutional ethnographic analysis of the province’s wildlife management programs, I demonstrate that the world moose experience is a text-mediated documentary reality. As management plans rely on biological and ethological knowledge, the documentary reality created by their enactment creates a double hermeneutic, where scientific understandings of moose organize nonscientific social activities and, as a result, change the object of scientific inquiry.