Hunting Worlds Turned Upside Down

Abstract

When asked by one of the editors of this special issue to consider submitting an essay on the significance to cultural criminology of a certain seventeenth-century Dutch painting that we had pointedly brought to his attention, one of us happily replied that we would attempt it. As likely authors, however, we soon began to mutter to ourselves that for our purposes, we were unable to distinguish with much satisfaction between cultural criminology, green criminology1 and visual criminology.2 We remain unable to do so. This seems not least because on numer‐ ous points and issues – power, inequality, spectacle, exclusion and suffering, for example – the chosen concepts and concerns of each of these evolving perspec‐ tives intersect with and blend into those of the other two. To the emerging perspective of what its exponents have recently dubbed a ‘greencultural criminology’ (Brisman & South, 2013), this essay seeks to add an explora‐ tory historical case study of ‘the visual’: Life of a Hunter (c. 1647-1650) by the Dutch painter Paulus Potter. In keeping with the spirit of Brisman and South’s consideration of ‘the cultural significance of the environment’ (2013: 130 [empha‐ sis in original]), our aim here is to examine how, on occasion, the production and consumption of a certain image simultaneously manages to reflect the prevailing cultural standards of an era and to show the way to their erosion and possible transcendence. In approaching our task, we are also motivated by a shared inter‐ est in the current movement towards a nonspeciesist criminology.3 (By ‘nonspe‐ ciesism’ we refer to and embrace what is surely one of the most daunting tasks facing criminology, namely, disengagement from the historical dominance of human interests over those of animals in discourses of abuse, cruelty and harm.)