A Political Ecology of the Body: Nature in French Anarchist Pedagogy around 1900

Abstract

This essay historicizes the concept of nature in French anarchist pedagogy around 1900. I argue that anarchist cosmology was not dualist in the sense that it did not neatly separate the natural from the cultural or social. Nature was rather understood as an ever-evolving realm that encompassed nonhuman and human entities. This example should encourage historical scholarship to look more deeply into what anthropologists sometimes call “naturalist ontology”. Instead of conceiving it as a fixed worldview, we should investigate its genealogy, transformations, and contestations.

Images of Nature: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Probst illustrates this on the example of French-speaking anarchist educators and schools. 'Returning to nature' for them meant promoting a self-regulated, holistic life, unmolested by the old clerical repression-a new life in which freedom, equality, autonomy, and solidarity were inherent values (Probst 2023).…”