EN EL ENTRAMADO DEL BOSQUE: UNA EXPLORACIÓN SENSORIAL DE LOS PAISAJES DE CAZA EN ALEMANIA.

In this article I offer a sensory exploration of hunting landscapes in contemporary Germany. In a first step, I show how such landscapes are built on and materially structured as cultural landscapes through hunting practices. In the remainder of the article, I examine more specifically how hunters perceive this landscape while being engaged in hunting and looking for game animals. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, I describe not only what “objects” hunters single out in this landscape as relevant for their practice. More importantly, I extend perception from a mere “object recognition” to the skilled sensing of perceptual Gestalt relations in the landscape, guided by embodied sensations. Hunters’ perception conceived this way thus becomes an atmospheric practice within the meshwork of a whole elemental weatherworld. I conclude by showing how a phenomenological understanding of hunters’ perception might help ethnographers to open up new horizons of more-than-human worlds.