Challenging widespread racism and determinism in the European “science” of their day, early anarchist geographers Elisée (1830–1905) and Elie Reclus (1827–1904), Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), Lev Mechnikov/Léon Metchnikoff (1838–1888) and others addressed so-called “first peoples” on planes of equality and empathy, considering them as possible inspirations in egalitarianism and mutual aid. Their elaborations especially aimed at popular pedagogy, in the context of anarchist understandings that knowledge could be a challenge to religious or secular dogmas and a defence of individual freedom through freethought and critical consciousness. In this sense, the “early anarchist geographers” refers to authors who were not only scholars, but also activists at the origin of both geography as a scholarly discipline and anarchist communism as a political doctrine and historical movement, as discussed by a rich literature in anarchist geographies (Couteau et al. 2024; Ferretti 2014, 2017a and 2017b; Pelletier 2013; Springer 2016).

The history of these scholar-activists raises questions about the relations between disciplines and transdisciplinary approaches to themes such as “Indigenous” and “first” peoples, which have been often considered as the “object” of anthropology. Anarchism also plays a role in anthropological debates on how different societies can inspire the betterment of Western, so-called “civilized” societies, going back to the pioneering works of Pierre Clastres (1977) and arguing in various ways that “moderns” should learn from stateless societies (Amborn 2019; Barclay 1996; Graeber 2004; Morris 2014; MacDonald 2018). Furthermore, in discussing “the art of not being governed,” James C. Scott argued that “civilisation can’t climb hills” (Scott 2009, 20); he noted the relations between political powers and geographical objects such as mountains and showed that certain historical circumstances favoured forms of resistance, as already claimed by anarchist geographers.

More recently, debates on anarchism and anthropology have been revived, as in a 2023 special issue of the Revue du MAUSS which included a tribute to David Graeber (Chanial and Vibert 2023). Starting in 2025, a thematic commission of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences is now dedicated to anarchist anthropologies. A new book by Anthony Ince and Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre discusses transdisciplinary connections between anarchist geographies, anthropologies, archaeologies and Indigenous studies. Revisiting Clastres’s definition of “society against the state,” they note the relativity of the state form in human histories and geographies, proposing decolonial notions such as the “radical pluriverse” of “anti-authoritarian approaches . . . to decentre readings of anarchist state critiques” (Ince and Barrera de la Torre 2024, 8).

To understand the importance of early anarchist geographers for these debates, it is worth noting that they formed a collaborative network, in which notions such as mutual aid, especially popularized by Kropotkin (1902), were collectively elaborated. Mutual aid was the primary lens that these geographers adopted to analyse, in non-racist and non-deterministic ways, knowledges that differed from the European cultures with which they were familiar. Building the monumental nineteen-volume Nouvelle Géographie universelle during their common exile in Switzerland, they were confronted with the need to apply empathy and understanding to peoples about whom trustworthy sources were scarce. They relied on the linguistic expertise of their entourage, including Metchnikoff’s proficiency in East Asian languages, and sought correspondence from the few progressive travellers on whom they could count, especially when it came to “first nations.”

Charles MacDonald notes that their idea of so-called “primitives” was not that of “radical alterity,” but of the “Other who is similar to us [and] provided with dignity” (MacDonald 2024, 356). The idea that different peoples adapted differently to different environments laid the ground for the relativity in appreciations of the cleverness that each group showed under varying circumstances, understanding the Other on a plan of parity. The Other could also teach the Self, namely concerning mutual aid. The idea that mutual aid could be learnt by practice also applied to non-human agency, as in Elisée Reclus’s discussions of non-human animals inspiring early human societies to practice mutual aid, which drew upon ideas of natural-human consubstantiality in German Naturphilosophie (Reclus 1905). Anarchist geographers also made sarcastic comparisons between the spirit of solidarity and basic communism that was observed among “primitives” and the “barbarity” of industrial capitalism in Europe and North America.

According to Elie Reclus, the “sense of solidarity” and “deep communist principles” (Reclus 1885, 100) that Inuit communities adopted to survive their climate allowed them to live “without prisons and policemen, bailiffs and pleas” (Reclus 1885, 134). He claimed that it was not the “poor savages” who deserved pity, but people living in capitalist societies. He drew other examples from groups that some “scientists” of his time considered even below the human level, for example Australian Aboriginals: “If you tell an honest cannibal from Queensland that workers are starving to death amid the fabulous wealth of Paris and London, he would think that you are making fun of him” (Reclus 1895, 169). These scholars contested scientific racism and even the very notion of biological “race,” a concept which, for Elisée Reclus, it was “time to get rid” (Reclus 1888, 554). Likewise, Metchnikoff contended that “no anthropologist has yet defined what precisely a human race is” (Metchnikoff 1888, 98).

Their geographical works systematically denounced colonial crimes and genocides, as in the Americas, where “the massacre began everywhere with the arrival of the White man” (Reclus 1890, 12–13), and where, in the Amazonian area, anarchist geographers found some correspondents– particularly those who did not match the classical stereotypes of travellers such as missionaries, colonial functionaries and military men– to be especially biased toward the “savages.” This was the case with French explorer Henri Coudreau (1859–1899), who lived several years among Oyampi people in the Amazon between Brazil and French Guiana, and his wife Octavie Renard (1867–1938). Broadly anticipating Clastrean themes, they strongly defended societies that showed examples of “pure anarchy, realised by people [devoid of the] fictitious needs” of the civilized, “freer than every citizen of Europe or North America, without chiefs, without functionaries” (Coudreau 1887, 309–310). Enjoying a regime of “freedom that knows not the tyranny of any law, and all the fraternity compatible with the human heart” (Coudreau 1893, 226), these Amazonian peoples were indifferent towards the artificial borders that postcolonial states formed on colonial models (Ferretti 2017b).

The powerful concept of mutual aid as understood by early anarchist geographies can still help challenge toxic legacies of colonialism such as racial hierarchies and human-natural dualisms. Their work provides abundant and inspiring examples of alliance between activism and scholarship along with empathy with Indigenous environmental knowledges. Rediscovering these early critical traditions remains of vital interest for the range of the human sciences and beyond.