Paper short abstract:

By developing what I call ‘untraditional ecological knowledge’ a growing movement seeks to rewild themselves. My multispecies ethnography focuses on the techniques, drawn from anthropological knowledge and traditional naturalist skills alike, that those at my field-site use to ‘live in two worlds’.

Paper long abstract:

The movement towards rewilding as a conservation method continues to grow in popularity, in spite of critiques that it recapitulates the nature-culture binary. Concurrently, there is a proliferation of organizations and schools worldwide self-described as being focused upon connecting Modern humans to nature, themselves, and to each other. My multispecies ethnographic study focuses upon how these communities are using anthropological knowledge, traditional naturalist skills, ecological insight, and indigenous models, among others, as a means by which to overcome the ontological distinction between humans and nature, and to rewild themselves. My colleagues at the Wilderness Awareness School in Washington State, USA, use a variety of techniques, including wildlife tracking, botany and plant medicine, experimental archeology of indigenous technologies, bird language, among others as means by which to expand their environmental awareness, to connect with nature, and enmesh themselves in the more-than-human world. By so doing they trouble long held debates within both conservation and anthropology as to the human ecological niche, and the prescriptive possibility of ethnographic knowledge creation. Engaging with fraught questions of coloniality and human nature debates, they seek a means by which they can find the ‘wild within’ by more fully ‘becoming human’ with the multispecies community they are always-already within. The personal transformations that develop among those at my field-site are profound, and their connectedness, I argue, is the result of their developing what might be called ‘untraditional ecological knowledge’.