Hunting, a technology of belonging in Northern Cyprus

An anthropological study of hunting in Northern Cyprus based on 17 months of fieldwork. Hunting is theorised as technology, as opposed to technique. This enables a sociotechnical analysis of how hunters, nonhumans, political forms and their spatialization make each other. I examine prehistoric seasonal organisation in Cyprus, in relation to human-animal relations that are not by default exploitative, and their replacement by the 'hunter-king' with the arrival of civilisation. Hunting emerges as a defining feature of coercive civilisation, rather than prehistoric society. I examine the later emergence of citizen(man) hunters, as part of European democratic modernity and conduct an ethnographic history of its particulars in Northern Cyprus. I conclude that hunting is delivered as a public service to Turkish Cypriot citizens who claim it. A thick description of schematic and statistical data on Northern Cyprus, Turkish Cypriots, hunters and hunting is then presented to denaturalize these categories, before evaluating them within the context of the TRNC State. I identify human-environmental relations in hunting as part of a process of belonging with other Turkish Cypriot men and the land. I analyse how a hunting establishment holds 'categorical' authority built on these living relations, as well as how it reproduces hunting 'leisure' space through making adaptations within historical margins embedded in spatialized infrastructure. Including law, mapping, bird breeding, committee meetings and punishment of pests. I examine the deeds of hunting as cultivating an ideal of nature being free, at ease but alert. Embodying this ideal in hunting, yields gifts that one is entitled to. Where receiving gifts from the land as a free person, also justifies oneself as a free citizen, with a natural right to the land as part of a Turkish Cypriot community, as hunter and as national. I conclude that people are spatialized in a world of nationality linked to private and public property. Therefore, it is incumbent upon people to naturalise their ideals as entitlements, because that is the 'natural order' that justifies one's position, in a world that requires that justification.