Rewild Your Inner Hunter-Gatherer: How an Idea about Our Ancestral Condition Is Recruited into Popular Debate in Britain and Ireland

• Autores: Noa Lavi, Alice Rudge, Graeme Warren
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 1, 2024, págs. 72-99
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • We examine how hunter-gatherers are imagined in popular debate in Britain and Ireland, demonstrating that aspects of hunter-gatherer lifestyles are presented as both the antithesis and antidote to perceived crises in contemporary society. We apply an anthropological lens to four areas of popular discourse: physical health, mental health, bushcraft, and survivalism. We identify how the imagined hunter-gatherer in these debates is constructed through processes of commodification that often reveal nostalgic colonial values regarding “human nature.” This repeats and sustains damaging perceptions of hunter-gatherer lifeways. It also highlights how archaeological, anthropological, and other academic research on hunter-gatherers is manifest in popular debates that reinforce assumptions about human nature and the significance of our evolutionary past within a neoliberal, colonialist context.