Beyond the Hunt: On the Ambiguous Depiction of Hunting Great Apes in the Light of Colonialism

This chapter demonstrates that travelogues from the colonial period containing narratives about the hunting of and by great apes became a narrative tool in which racialized ideologies, as well as gender-political agendas, found expression. Due to Europeans’ lack of familiarity with apes and the animals’ morphological and ethological similarity to humans, colonialists’ encounters with great apes unsettled the boundaries between human and animal. Operating in dichotomies, this chapter demonstrates how hunting as a male-connotated practice opened a multidimensional field intersecting the categories of race and gender to devalue the humanity of Black and Indigenous people and to stabilize the social position of the white, male subject. The chapter shows how narratives from travelogues permeated the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, circulating through the realms of science and politics to serve as ideological agents.