Losing Samson: Nature, Crime, and Boundaries

Abstract

This article examines a community's reaction to the poaching of a large elk. Extending the Durkheimian approach to nature, crime, law, and social control, this study discusses the anguish and anger provoked by the infraction, tributes to the fallen animal, calls for more severe and certain sanctions for poaching, and the boundaries affirmed in the incident's aftermath. The implications of this communal response to a wildlife offense for criminalization and conceptions of community are considered.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Arnold Arluke, Kurt Fausch, Leslie Irvine, Michael Monahan, and James Pickering for their insights and encouragement. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editors of The Sociological Quarterly for their many helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Lindsay Redd for her meticulous transcription of the audio-recorded data. This research was supported by a Faculty Senate Research Grant from the University of Denver.

NOTES

Notes

¹ The principal objections dispute what critics regard as Durkheim's inaccurate evolutionary account of law; his overly consensual depiction of society; his naïveté about state power and other forms of domination; and his inattentiveness to enduring inequalities and their enervating effects on a variety of institutions, including systems of justice.

² We draw selectively on Weber to clarify our revisions to the Durkheimian approach to crime, punishment, law, and boundaries, while recognizing that these theorists advance disparate conceptions of modernity. Weber saw the modern world as disenchanted, and while claiming that modern men and women, much like the ancient Greeks and Romans, pledge fealty to many different and often rival gods, he depicted the objects of modern worship—the value spheres of distinct institutional domains—in secular terms. Durkheim, on the other hand, highlighted the religious dimensions of all social orders, even the most modern.

³ These archival data are analyzed in greater depth in Granfield and Colomy (2005).

⁴ No individual we interviewed, media account, or any other data available to us identified the original source of Samson's name. Every person with whom we spoke, however, believed that the name aptly captured the elk's uncommon size, strength, and nobility.

⁵ Arnold Arluke mentioned the term ecomorphization to one of the authors in a personal communication (November 15, 2002).

⁶ Distancing the tribute from even the appearance of an unseemly interest in exploiting tragedy for profit, the ad noted that “All proceeds from sales will be contributed to the Colorado Division of Wildlife's Operation Game Thief [a special program to apprehend and prosecute poachers] and to Animal Rescue [a special fund for treatment of injured birds of prey].”

⁷ The phrase is Garland's (1990:61).

⁸ Remark delivered during hearings of the Colorado House Committee on Agriculture, Livestock, and Natural Resources. January 14, 1998.

⁹ Remarks delivered during hearings of the Colorado House Committee on Agriculture, Livestock, and Natural Resources, January 14, 1998.