Human Rewilding in the 21st Century: Why Anthropologists Fail by James M. Van Lanen (shipped)

From long-time Oak contributor and anthropologist James Van Lanen comes a sweeping a brutal deconstruction of contemporary hunter-gatherer anthropology. Coming from deep inside the anthropological research space James provides perhaps the most unique perspective and critique of anthropology available.

Check out Oak 6 for a follow-up to the release of this book, including internal discourse with anthropologists.

"Responding to recent critics from academia and the progressive Left, this book presents Human Rewilding as both a political platform and physical praxis that dismantles the agendas of both the Left and Right as solutions for adequately dealing with our 21st century socioecological crisis.

Using anecdotes from both personal experience and his own decades of anthropological research, including significant time with indigenous hunter-gatherers, Van Lanen situates rewilding as a philosophy of profound anthropological importance and contemporary relevance. He explains that rewilding is an impetus rooted in core, far-reaching, anthropologically profound, evolutionary, historic, ethnographic, spiritual, and philosophical human motivations. 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."