Изяждането на дивите животни (исторически разрез)
The Eating of Wild Animals (Historical Perspective)

Summary/Abstract: The author reconstructs the less investigated attitudes to game as an object of chase and consumption in history. He studies symbolic, theoretical and cultural representations of those attitudes in different historical periods - Greek and Roma antiquity, Middle Ages and contemporary society. In the Greek antiquity the attitude towards wild animals marks the boundary between civilization and barbarity, but nature still prevails. When the game is transformed into original product of the high class cookery in the Roma culture, it looks like that the nature is totally overcome. But then the gastronomy of the Roma culture is forgotten for a long period and in the Middle Ages the attitude towards game becomes a field of power symbols and social prestige. In the last part of the text the impact of industrialization and globalization upon game is analyzed. In that part the main conclusions are about the unclear boundaries between nature and culture, the simultaneous processes of individualization and diversification in the world of wild animals and the going away of its symbolic function. So in the analyzed issue, seemingly very private and everyday life, one could discover mutually overlapping and distinguished forms of nature culture interrelation, of metaphysical and philosophic-theological interpretations of the world; as well as symbols of power. It turns out that this phenomenon - the wild animals - has a lot of historically different and diverse meanings.

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