I have been in relationship with the community surrounding the Wilderness Awareness School (WAS) for over a decade, first as a student and assistant instructor, and in recent years, as an ethnographer. There are many things that draw me to the misty foothills of the Cascade Mountains where the school practices nature-connective and culture-building techniques. One which I find enduringly fascinating is how they turn to the discipline of anthropology for guidance, looking to the ethnographic record for a wealth of information that they see as addressing their project.

Roy Wagner (2016) famously termed the efforts of his Melanesian interlocutors to analyze his social background through the lens of their own concepts and contexts as a kind of “reverse anthropology.” A different dynamic is at play among my interlocutors who are using our anthropological concepts to understand themselves and guide their work. I think of their practices for this reason, to invoke experimental archeology’s inceptive influence on this cultural movement, as a form of “experimental anthropology.”

Ghassan Hage has noted that “anthropological works, capturing the plurality of the ways in which . . . relations are lived, have become important resources for a radical ecology in search for alternative forms of human–nature relations” (2012,295). This may explain why someone like Jon Young (2017), the co-founder of WAS and a prominent leader in the nature-connection movement (who often reiterates that he has a degree in anthropology from Rutgers University), looks to the ethnographic record.

Young’s recent 512 Project has formulated what he terms the “basic 64 cultural elements,” arranged into a grid-like system resembling the kind of classificatory pursuit of which Structuralists were once fond. These include “cultural elements” like tending the wild, greeting and grieving customs, and ceremony and regalia, most of which would fit nicely within classic anthropological categorizations. These technologies are in turn developed in their unique ways by members of widely distributed communities that take influence from Young, WAS included.

Their work has not been without its detractors, however, both from within and without. Lavi, Rudge, and Warren (2024, 77) have critiqued the broader cultural field in which WAS sits, writing that by:

. . . selecting particular skilled-practices and perceptions of “indigenous knowledge,” bushcrafters create a new, fragmented knowledge domain. If originally, such knowledge was rooted in a local social/environmental context, bushcraft extracts it from its context, transforms it into a more generic travelling knowledge, and re-roots in the “lost ways of our ancestors.”

There are certainly elements of truth to this assessment, and the authors are right to point to the dangers inherent in practices that can sometimes exhibit noble savage tropes and unsanctioned appropriation, which anthropology has itself exemplified at times. However, it is a mistake to reduce their cultivation of influences as destined to be fragmentary. Those at WAS do indeed conceive of nature-connective practices and the “cultural elements” used to cultivate them as our common heritage. As they feel themselves to have been raised in a society in which these skills are underdeveloped or lost entirely, they look to (primarily Indigenous) communities they find within “our” ethnographic writings, both living and historical, as guides who can help them build their own socially- and environmentally-rooted practices.

That being said, in recent years WAS has reckoned more fully with its enmeshment in colonial structures and has been going through the, at times difficult, process of attempting to redress some of their past errors in approach and appropriation. This includes building relationships and partnerships more intentionally with local Indigenous organizations such as the Blue Heron Canoe Journey in efforts at reconciliation and allyship. These efforts may not be seen as sufficient, but WAS is far from alone in continuing to grapple with the toxic legacies that they have inherited.

While it is undoubtedly true that, as Whyte, Caldwell, and Schaefer (2018) have put it, “Indigenous lessons about sustainability are not just for ‘All Humanity,’” my interlocutors insist that living in correspondence (Ingold 2016) with the myriad other-than-humans that make up landscapes is not just necessary for survival for us all, human and other-than, but is something that all people deserve. To overcome the profound disorientation towards landscapes that has resulted from their domestication, as Heather Anne Swanson (2018) has put it, they are attempting to learn from the examples of people who have long succeeded in living in place with their nonhuman neighbors.

In their attempts to do so, WAS faces what Mario Blaser calls the “infrastructures of displacement” that exemplify industrial socio-ecological orders that are “constantly proliferating, weakening, and taking over grounding infrastructures . . . to the point that for many it has become very difficult to realize visions of a good life premised on being emplaced” (2025, xiii). Yet they persist: through closely guarded community rites of passage that ring with the influence of Van Gennep (1960), to pedagogical methods harvested from the anthropology of childhood (Lancy 2016), they are cultivating their community, one that includes both human and other-than. Performing perhaps a different form of salvage, they are treating the ethnographic record and anthropological theory more like a “how to” library than the systematized archive anthropologists have been trained to perceive, in an attempt to transform themselves and cultivate an emplaced culture.

However we as anthropologists might feel about their notion of the “culture concept,” their evolutionary assumptions, or the rigor with which both anthropological and Indigenous knowledge is being used, I am calling ethnographic attention to what they have realized in the process. The results of their experiment can—and perhaps should— “expand our awareness” (as my interlocutors are wont to say), of the surprising ways that anthropological theory can be “tested” out in the field, even in the face of the discipline’s well-grounded fears. Appreciating the ways our knowledge is used outside of academic confines gives us an understanding of the discipline we would not otherwise have. By using our ethnographic methods I have reflectively returned their own gaze, affording me a vantage point from which anthropology can reflexively gain insight into our own knowledge practices, and their possible applications.

Note

This is a condensed preview of some of the work in my forthcoming dissertation, "Cultural Rewilding: An Ethnographic Study of the Nature Connection Movement." For a special issue I have recently co-edited on this very subject, see Hunter Gatherer Research. If you are interested in the Wilderness Awareness School and its variety of programs, please check out their website.