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Bird in hand: How experience makes nature

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Abstract

It is almost a truism that nature is social, but by what means is nature made social at the level of the interactional encounter? While the transformation of society/nature relationships is often approached through the problematic of distance, and at the scale of macro-historical transformation, this article uses a conflict between American birdwatchers and ornithologists over scientific “collecting” (literally, the killing of birds) to examine the processes through which individuals come to know nature, and come to know it so differently. With John Dewey’s (1958 [1925]) “experience” as the unit of analysis, I trace changes in each group’s experience with birds over the past century; the phenomenology of the resulting encounters; and the understanding that emerges from each in order to understand (1) how, empirically, these two very different loves of birds are formed, and (2) knowledge of nature as an affective sensibility shaped by experiences of closeness.

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Notes

  1. This article is based on 100 h of interviews and participant observation, predominantly in the Department of Ornithology at New York’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), conducted between September 2010 and March 2011.

  2. This pattern I observed is supported by recent statistics. The likelihood of being a birder in the United States greatly increases with both education and income level (USFWS 2009). While the degree to which communities of color are underrepresented as a percentage of national averages remains contested, and efforts to increase diversity are on the rise (e.g., Edmondson 2006), the disparity remains pronounced in urban areas with greater numbers of minority residents—such as the one in which I conducted my research.

  3. Differences between the development of American birding and its trajectories in Europe, South America, and Asia, as well as the American bird protection movement’s relationship to broader conservation efforts are all, alas, beyond the scope of this article. My fieldwork suggests that the American cultural context—and in particular associations between scientific collecting and trophy hunting in the United States—may have polarized ornithologists and birders more in the United States than in Britain and elsewhere.

  4. Plumage imports into the United States were valued at $8 million at their peak in 1910, before legislation began to limit the trade, and the industry employed 83,000 craftworkers to make hats from the plumes in the United States. As Robin Doughty explains, US imports were typically measured in monetary value, but as feather weights provide a better sense of scale: the United Kingdom imported an astounding 500,000 lb of feathers annually between 1900 and 1910 (1975, pp. 23–31).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Craig Calhoun, Colin Jerolmack, Harvey Molotch, the NYLON research network, and the Editors and reviewers of Theory and Society for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

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Correspondence to Hillary Angelo.

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Angelo, H. Bird in hand: How experience makes nature. Theor Soc 42, 351–368 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9196-x

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