Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 2006

Department

Anthropology

Abstract

This cultural analysis reconsiders the modernist narrative about the politics of whales and whale hunting in order to explore Icelandic responses to the return of the killer whale Keiko (star of the Free Willy movies) to Icelandic waters in 1998. Ambivalence about Keiko’s plight required cultural creativity to block identification with the whale since in Icelandic hegemonic discourse such feelings have been associated with the supposed irrationality of foreign protests against whale hunting. This essay draws on Bruno Latour’s writings about the politics of nature to argue for abandoning nature in a step toward the ethnographic study of human-nonhuman relations.

Comments

This article was originally published in Anthropological Quarterly, 79(2): 225-260. © 2006 Institute for Ethnographic Research

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