On the Wild Side: From the Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers to Postmodern Foraging, Bushcraft and New-Age Nature Seekers

This book is a story about a personal search for the ‘natural’ and for living ‘in nature’. The author is an ethnobotanist who has studied foraging practices in many parts of the world, including Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, China and Laos, as well as experimented with living as a primitive hunter-gatherer in his land in the Polish Carpathians. He describes his own experiences, the lives of various hunter-gatherer groups reported by scientific literature, and stories of friends who are also in search of closer contact with nature. This book is probably the most comprehensive attempt to capture the journey to being ‘natural’ performed by so many members of rich Western societies. The best way to do this subject justice is neither to resort to a completely informal or to a completely formal scientific form. The book thus is reminiscent of a pile of scattered notes, a silva rerum, a diary. Some chapters are strictly scientific, even with citations and footnotes, some are the kind of stories you would hear an elder tells round a bonfire. Primitive hunter-gatherers mix with survivalists, hippies, naturists, lovers of psychedelia, suburban hunters, mushroom pickers, beggars, post-modern foragers, scientists, health-food freaks and people walking around shopping malls.