Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf? Young people's responses to the conflicts over large carnivores in Eastern Norway.

摘要

Controversies over large carnivores are often interpreted as clashes between rural traditionalism and urban modernity. Rural communities, however, have never been culturally monolithic, and modernization will increase the diversity. To probe such diverse and changing attitudes towards nature, I conducted a qualitative study of young people in a rural community in eastern Norway. A total of 31 people 16-20 years of age were interviewed in focus groups or separately. Contrary to popular images of such communities as unified against "pests," all typical views of the carnivore issue were present. Those in favour of the large carnivores were typically middle-class youths with a strong "outward" orientation, while those who wanted to shoot the predatorswere mostly working-class boys with strong ties to the local hunting culture. This pattern was interpreted as a conflict between dominant and subordinate forms of knowledge, and between abstraction-oriented and production-oriented cultural forms. Asidefrom the growth of the pro-carnivore middle-class segments, the most significant effect of modernization appeared to be the removal of many young people from the subject matter of the conflict. A "subculturalization" of the working-class hunting culturealso could be discerned, however.