Recently, Jason and I were wandering through REI looking for a birthday gift for Mike when we stumbled upon a book called Let’s Get Primitive: The Urban Girl’s Guide to Camping by Heather Menicucci. It looked to be a clever, irreverent guide to back-country camping designed for women not so used to the outdoors. I [...]

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to makeup ads in the past few years (and if you haven’t, shame on you! Bad consumer! Bad!), you’ve probably noticed that “all-natural” mineral makeup has been growing in popularity these last few years. It’s gotten so popular that major brands are producing cheaper knock-offs that contain [...]

Spring is in the air, and we’re ready to get back outside, but sunshine ain’t what it used to be. Primitive living involves spending a lot of time outdoors, but people nowadays have much more to worry about vis-a-vis the sun than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, especially those of us with skin the color of unbaked [...]

It’s a well-known truism that people (usually teens or young adults) going out of their way to dress differently all end up looking the same. People commonly point that out to mock punks, or Goths, or emo kids, or whatever the new “sub-culture” fashion is, but that completely misses the point. These people generally aren’t [...]

I can never get into live albums. Or remixes, for that matter, or any alternate version of a song that I know. The few exceptions to this rule tend to be songs I heard first and/or exclusively as live versions (Nirvana’s “About a Girl,” for example) or songs unique to that live performance. But in [...]

Well, the long vacation might have tipped you off, but it seems that we, the Tribe of Anthropik, have come to the end of the trail. We’ve waited this long mostly to clear up some issues of timing, but in May, the Anthropik Network will come to the end of its five-year run. But don’t fret too much—at 1:30 PM Eastern time, on 18 June, you’ll get the first issue of Toby’s People.

Willem Larsen and Urban Scout have put together an amazing, thorough, and much-needed introduction to “E-Primitive.” Larsen’s explorations of animist language and oral tradition at the College of Mythic Cartography have contributed greatly to the growing rewilding movement, and this work summarizes much of that work in a single piece. We at the Tribe of Anthropik feel proud to present this work, cross-posted from Urban Scout and the College of Mythic Cartography. We don’t necessarily agree with all the details, but that hardly matters next to the importance of the main point, with which we could hardly agree more. This article greatly inspired us, and we hope it will inspire you, too.

A common concern among women who stumble upon primitivism (usually through their boyfriends or husbands) is that living primitively is necessarily anti-feminist, since there is no way for a woman to control when or if she gets pregnant without the help of latex condoms, pills, and so forth. But looking at the grand sweep of [...]

At Raccoon Creek State Park’s PATH WAYS’s herbal medicines workshop, the instructors provide a recipe for natural, poison-free insect repellent. When Jason and I first attended the workshop back in 2006, we came back with two 4oz bottles of this “bug juice”: a combination of simple extra virgin olive oil and essential plant oils. Since [...]

I think most prospective rewilders can share my dilemma. We hear about the fabulous adventures of those successful trackers, educators and idols of our movement who’ve found some way to dedicate themselves, full-time, to their passion, usually thanks, at least in part, to a supportive and understanding community (often their own family) who have the means and the will to support those endeavors. Good for them, and we all owe the people who support them a measure of gratitude for giving us those motivating, inspirational icons, but it makes for a model few of us can really emulate. Perhaps our families don’t really understand what we hope and wish for (and given the massive amounts of disinformation and propaganda invested into discouraging such pursuits, we can hardly blame them), or perhaps they simply don’t have the capacity to support our endeavors, as unlikely as they seem to ever net any economic benefit that our society would recognize. We do not have the skills, nor the community support of any kind of tribe, to rely on our earth skills for shelter and sustenance; if we tried to shelter ourselves and feed ourselves with what we know now, we’d only ensure our death, whether by starvation, thirst or exposure.