Human Rewilding in the 21st Century: Why Anthropologists Fail

By James M Van Lanen

Human Rewilding in the 21st Century is an updated descriptor of the sociopolitical perspective and theoretical basis of the contemporary rewilding movement as seen from the lens of an anthropologist who has worked extensively with indigenous peoples and with various back-to-the-land oriented activist subcultures in North America. Van Lanen deals with several aspects of the rewilding movement that are seen as controversial - i.e., not theoretically sound and not politically correct - by various activists, anthropologists, and other academics. Van Lanen's particular focus is to expose an emergent trend among some anthropologists, and other political actors, towards criticizing the rewilding movement (and/or "primitivism"). The book discusses how these actors promote that they are all about decolonization but reveals that instead these types of positions often help carry forward the evolutionary mechanisms which are responsible for the ongoing destruction of both planetary ecology and indigenous societies. The subtitle "Why Anthropologists Fail" is not intended to accuse all anthropologists of failing to deal adequately with what rewilding offers as a response to our planetary crises. The subtitle is directed at specific modes of anthropological thinking, and their outside political counterparts, that can be best generally described as the postmodernist and progressivist contingent within social and cultural anthropology. Van Lanen assesses that it is this camp which persistently ruins what anthropology has to offer the world in respect to garnering our most cogent understanding of the material, social, economic, and psychological elements which drive our current human and planetary crisis. He informs how postmodernist cultural anthropology, and the politics which drive it, concerns itself with upholding the values of progress and western civilization very much more than it concerns itself with upholding the socioecological elements that made so many indigenous cultures exist within the most temporally stable and ecologically adaptive formats known for our species. Van Lanen defines and positions historically, and even prehistorically, a radical socioecological activist version of human wildness and rewilding, informing readers why this physical, social, ecological, economic, spiritual, and political movement should be taken seriously by social scientists, and by humanity. While agreeing that anthropologists who are critical of rewilding are in many aspects correct in their observations that that today's popular culture promoters of indigeneity, hunter-gatherers, and what is "primitive" tend to have meager understandings of the anthropological record's nuances, and acknowledging that the assumptions which these promoters project onto the future often lack cognizance of the deeper historical and physical complications at hand, Van Lanen highlights that rewilding is in fact a much more wide-ranging sociopolitical impulse than those who criticize it tend to understand. This book explains that even if the popular "lifestyle solutions" orientation towards rewilding is quite flawed it is an impetus nonetheless rooted in core, far-reaching, anthropologically profound, evolutionary, historic, ethnographic, spiritual, and philosophical human motivations. Van Lanen explains that rewilding's critics who ignore this anthropological reality join nearly all the sociopolitical analyses of our current era - those originating both from academia and popular politics, whether politically Left or Right - in not being sufficiently confrontational with the material evolutionary forces that have brought us into the dire set of crises our species and our planet now face.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CPDDD9GC
• ISBN13: 9798870536705
• Release Date: December 2023
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 271 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.6" x 6.0"