Chamayou's Manhunts: From Territory to Space?

This brief article discusses Grégoire Chamayou’s Manhunts, a pow-erful account of human inhumanity, the tracking down and killing of other humans. As he says in his second paragraph:To write the history of manhunts is to write one fragment of a long his-tory of violence on the part of the dominant. It is also to write a history of the technologies of predation indispensable for the establishment and reproduction of relationships of domination.1Chamayou is insistent that his focus is not on a metaphor, but on “concrete historical phenomena in which human beings were tracked down, captured, or killed in accord with the forms of the hunt.”2The main problem has to do with the fact that the hunter and the hunted do not belong to different species. Since the distinction be-tween the predator and his prey is not inscribed in nature, the hunt-ing relationship is always susceptible to a reversal of positions. Prey sometimes band together to become hunters in their turn. The his-tory of a power is also the history of the struggles to overthrow it.3His examples are wide-ranging, from Ancient Greece to the Bible, from exile to slavery to colonialism, and to zombies. The book is strikingly illustrated and has plenty of powerful examples. It pro-ceeds in a non-systematic manner, and is suggestive rather than comprehensive in its cases and references. Nonetheless it is a strik-ing and original analysis.