Deception in practice: Hunting and bullfighting entanglements in southern Spain

Abstract

Deception is a recurrent strategy deployed in the relations between human beings, between humans and animals, and even between animals, and is normally analyzed from a perspective that emphasizes its discursive nature and certain of its ontological, epistemological and axiological effects. According to this orthodox view, deception falsifies, distorts, and conceals reality; it thus equates to a lie and is consequently devalued by it. An analysis of two ethnographic contexts of human–animal relations in southern Spain—partridge hunting and bullfighting—allows us to go beyond such a univocal and simple notion of deception. Through our analysis we wish to problematize and reconceptualize that notion, in a way that considers it as a practice and even as a resource; as a form of knowledge that fosters interaction and the generation of singular frameworks of experience, in which reality, the product of that deception, is lived—paradoxically—in terms of truth.