Modulating Hunting Atmospheres: Mud and Material Flows Beyond the Kill

ABSTRACT This article argues that hunting is not a bounded event but a materially redistributed atmosphere that extends beyond the kill and across field, truck, clothing, and home. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork with wild boar hunters in Uruguay, I show how mud, odors, blood, and bodily residues carry the sensory, affective, and material force of tracking, waiting, and pursuit into domestic space. Rather than treating this continuity as merely phenomenological or symbolic, I explain how it is materially reproduced through adhesive, persistent, and indexical substances that bind bodies, vehicles, dogs, and households into the hunt's ongoing life. I develop the concept of atmospheric modulation to describe how these substances reorganize relations across spaces and times. In doing so, the article reframes hunting as a pervasive more‐than‐human practice and contributes to anthropological debates on materiality, residues, traces, and the social life of substances.