| Title | 2. EARTH SWIMMERS / ON CAPTURE |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | A PRACTICE- BASED ETHNOGRAPHY OF MOLE CATCHING AND FILM MAKING IN NORTH YORKSHIRE |
| Contributor | Hermione Spriggs(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.63308/63878687083054.ch02 |
| Landing page | https://www.whpress.co.uk/publications/2025/03/04/meam-2/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Hermione Spriggs |
| Publisher | The White Horse Press |
| Published on | 2025-07-01 |
| Long abstract | The film Earth Swimmers (2021) attends to the tricks and techniques that mole catchers use to access the underground world of the mole. Using tools as portals into the mole’s vibratory world, probes, feet, noses and rain-making instruments lead the viewer into alternative ways of sensing and knowing the earth. This film emerged within a larger body of work resulting from direct collaboration with a professional mole catcher – one outcome of long-term ethnographic fieldwork investigating rural pest control practices and attitudes to land in rural North Yorkshire, UK. This chapter describes the author’s hunting collaborators’ practical and intimate engagement with the worlds of ‘vermin’ species in North Yorkshire, where she spent a year apprenticing to rural pest controllers in 2020–21. The chapter shows how specific skills and techniques of the body underpin and make possible the empathic understanding that enables a trapper first to think like a prey animal, and then to reach into its world through ‘respectful deception’ (Anderson et al., 2017), taking its life with minimum disruption and making use of its body as food or repurposing it otherwise. The artful engagements of the author’s interlocutors with the worlds or umwelten (Uexküll, 2010) of other animal species provides a generative model for her own perspectival manoeuvres as she experiments with Nigel, the mole catcher and central collaborator in the film, and his relationship to moles, and how to responsibly negotiate with death herself in the making of the film Earth Swimmers (2021). The author argues for the value of ‘anthropological borrowing’, pointing to the creative potential and theoretical productivity of methods, forms and concepts from the field. Specifically, the mole catcher taught her creative multispecies methods, such as animal tracking and tactical probing, inviting the author to engage with anthropological theory in a practical way, decentring her own perspective, making room for the perception, agency and subjectivity of nonhuman others. |
| Page range | pp. 64–81 |
| Print length | 18 pages |
| Media | 1 video |
Hermione Spriggs is an artist, writer and researcher. Her current Ph.D. research explores art and creativity through the lens of land-based practice in North Yorkshire, through long-term collaboration with traditional mole catchers and other unlikely stewards of the land. Public / participatory art projects draw from this ethnographic context and from broader interests in rural folk practices, radical anthropology, hunting lore and female trickster intelligence. Hermione gained an MFA in Visual Art at UC San Diego (2012) and a BSc in Anthropology from UCL (2008). Her edited book Five Heads: Art, Anthropology and Mongol-Futurism is published by Sternberg Press. Current projects include an edible public artwork for Kings Hedges Cambridge, learning to echolocate as Bat Choir, and ongoing collaborative work exploring practices of attention and alternative forms of community organisation.