Wildtending, sometimes called ‘the Hoop’, was in 2014–2017 a loose movement of mostly white non-Indigenous aspiring nomads in the US northwest that appropriated Indigenous ecological practices to denounce civilisation and enact alternative ways of being human. Those who practised wildtending were specifically committed to gathering and propagating plant foods across the Columbia Plateau and Great Basin regions in the US northwest. Wildtending was a counter-cultural group that strived to distance itself from cis-hetero-patriarchal and ecocidal social norms. They were also a settler network that benefited from – and did not materially disrupt – extant anti-Indigenous relations of power and property. This article traces notions of human and non-human in wildtending narratives, engaging Indigenous studies critiques of anthropology’s ontological turn as well as Black studies analyses of how discourses of ‘Man’ reproduce white supremacy. The conflicting ontological claims enclosed in diverse wildtending narratives, which reflected ambivalent stances toward the environing structures of US settler empire, provide an opportunity to re-examine the ways that ontology is theorised across the social sciences. Wildtending’s utopic-dystopic narratives attest to the deeply felt desire of ‘hoopsters’ to re-form the human, and to the great capacity for imagination and hope that exists within communities wishing to re-create their socio-ecological lives. The contradictions among ‘hoopster’ narratives show that ontology is not only socially received but is something we make and do together, albeit under power-laden conditions. At the same time, the limited scope of wildtending’s critiques of colonial ‘Man’ suggest that achieving wildtending goals – healing the land, becoming better humans – also requires anti-colonial action, the return of lands to Indigenous nations, and the transformation of social and political-legal conditions throughout the US west.
This paper argues that the relationship bushcraft creates between artisan, landscape and tools to enable the acquisition of food and spatial mobility expresses a broadly-based environmental cultural continuity in English foraging practices. The perspective of bushcraft practitioners has rarely been represented in academic literature, partly, perhaps, because it cuts across many different sectors of research and practice. Accordingly, we bring a transdisciplinary approach, utilising queer theory and trans theory as a helpful methodology for examining marginalised communities. Recognising the problematic nature of ‘slippery’ terms like ‘bushcraft’, ‘hunter-gatherer’, and ‘Indigenous’, we explain the key concepts and terms used to delineate an ethos of ‘discontinuous continuity’ in bushcraft practices over time. Limiting our geographical context to England, we provide a historical record of the disenfranchisement of endemic English people from their traditional rights to hunting and gathering, subsequently extended under Norman rule by Forest Law, demonstrating a detailed record of increasing suppression of local traditional foraging practices in the early Medieval period. We focus first on the historical record of these practices before making comparisons with those in the prehistoric Mesolithic, to counter ethnonationalist fantasies of ‘Englishness’ as defined by unbroken racial or linguistic purity. Moving to the modern period, we identify this continuity of foraging as forms of knowledge, practice and a counter-cultural movement, represented by the contemporary bushcraft movement’s creation of a place for reconnection with traditional knowledge. We thereby challenge pop-survival television’s depiction of bushcraft, which positions the natural world as dangerous and something to be feared. Current restrictions on land-use act against this reclamation and exploration of foraging skills in England. Nevertheless, contemporary bushcraft provides a valuable education in resilience and a sustaining vision of kinship between those wishing to re-establish at least some parts of the knowledge and skillsets which were once the only means to survive and thrive in the English landscape.
The ongoing sixth mass extinction (and its components of climate change, ecological die-off, ocean acidification, etc) continues to be a growing threat to – and a result of – certain human cultures. These problems of global proportions press on us with urgency. The sciences exist, at least in part, to find solutions to problems of this kind and, more broadly, to the problem of ‘how to live in the world’. For good methodological reasons the scientific method encourages neutrality in this endeavour. However, applied science must, by its nature, break neutrality through experimentation, thus exceeding objective inquiry and interceding in the system being studied. Anthropology is one such science that can be used as a kind of praxis in what could be termed ‘experimental anthropology’. Through this experimental form of anthropological inquiry, a growing number of people have identified civilisation itself (not to be conflated with civil society) as the driver of mass extinction and have explicitly sought out and experimented with ‘alternative’ forms of subsistence and social organisation based on anthropological research concerning hunter-gatherer populations. In this article I explore this process within the context of the human ‘rewilding’ movement, specifically through the non-profit community organisation, Rewild Portland, as an ethnographic example of such iterative practices. I aim to show that cultural rewilding, as a form of experimental or applied anthropology that draws directly from hunter-gatherer research can be performed by lay people, in both a scientific and ethical way outside of the academy, and how the academy can better support this type of everyday science.
The intensification of industrialism and the spectacle of capitalist production have led to the expansion of surveillance and management over the entirety of the biotic and abiotic. Luckily, the world is not entirely tame, and hopefully never can be, no matter the desires of capital to standardise the world. The forces of standardisation confront the impulse for wildness and anarchy in an ongoing struggle. This article takes critiques of the top-down state’s attempts to dominate and manage the planet found within political theory, such as the work of critical theorists, Situationists, Autonomous Marxists and Green Anarchists, and puts them in dialogue with insights found within hunter-gatherer studies. Hunter-gatherer cultures provide some of the most meaningful and successful examples of how to actively confront state formation, and thus can provide crucial insight for political thinking and movements which seek to do the same. This article endeavours to address a gap in most academic work in political theory which only centres statist and industrial politics, ignoring or erasing hunter-gatherer societies from its imagination. As a result, many of the supposed ‘solutions’ that political theory offers to address our socio-ecological crises merely expand the spheres of control and domination, rather than providing liberation.
