Notes
1. The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, G. P. Maximoff editor (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953), p. 144.
2. Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 158.
3. Peter Kropotkin, 'Anarchism,' the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, in Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed. Roger N. Baldwin (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), pp. 285-87.
4. Katinka Matson, 'Preface,' The Psychology Today Omnibook of Personal Development (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1977), n.p.
5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 95-96. Heavenly will be the day when one can get straightforward formulations from Foucault, interpretations of whose views are often contradictory.
6. Paul Goodman, 'Politics Within Limits,' in Crazy Hope and Finite Experience: Final Essays of Paul Goodman, ed. Taylor Stoehr (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), p. 56.
7. L. Susan Brown, The Politics of Individualism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993). Brown's hazy commitment to anarchocommunism seems to derive more from a visceral preference than from her analysis.
8. Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchism, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1985, 1991). Bey's individualism might easily resemble that of the late Fredy Perlman and his anticivilizational acolytes and primitivists in Detroit's Fifth Estate, except that T.A.Z. rather confusedly calls for 'a psychic paleolithism based on High-Tech' (p. 44).
9. 'T.A.Z.,' The Whole Earth Review (Spring 1994), p. 61.
10. Cited by Jose Lopez-Rey, Goya's Capriccios: Beauty, Reason and Caricature, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 80-81.
11. George Bradford, 'Stopping the Industrial Hydra: Revolution Against the Megamachine,' The Fifth Estate, vol. 24, no. 3 (Winter 1990), p. 10.
12. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), p. 430.
13. Bradford, 'Civilization in Bulk, Fifth Estate (Spring 1991), p. 12.
14. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York and Burlingame: Harcourt Brace & World, 1963), p. 301. All page numbers herein refer to this edition.
15. Kropotkin, 'Anarchism,' Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 285.
16. The conference papers were published in Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1968).
17. 'What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out in Scarce Resources,' in Lee and Devore, Man the Hunter, p. 43.
18. See particularly Paul Radin's The World of Primitive Man (New York: Grove Press, 1953), pp. 139-150.
19. John Zerzan, Future Primitive and Other Essays (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1994), p. 16. The reader who has faith in Zerzan's research may try looking for important sources like 'Cohen (1974)' and 'Clark (1979)' (cited on pages 24 and 29, respectively) in his bibliography -- they and others are entirely absent.
20. The literature on these aspects of prehistoric life is very large. Anthony Legge and Peter A. Rowly's 'Gazelle Killing in Stone Age Syria,' Scientific American, vol. 257 (Aug. 1987), pp. 88-95, shows that migrating animals could have been slaughtered with devastating effectiveness by the use of corrals. The classical study of the pragmatic aspects of animism is Bronislaw Malinowski's Myth, Science and Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954). Manipulative anthropomorphization is evident in many accounts of transmigrations from the human to nonhuman realm claimed by shamans, as in the myths of the Makuna reported by Kaj 'rhem, 'Dance of the Water People,' Natural History (Jan. 1992).
21. On the pygmies, see Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo (New York: Clarion/Simon and Schuster, 1961), pp. 101-102. On the Eskimos, see Gontran de Montaigne Poncins's Kabloona: A White Man in the Arctic Among the Eskimos (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941), pp. 208-9, as well as in many other works on traditional Eskimo culture.
22. That many grasslands throughout the world were produced by fire, probably dating back to Homo erectus, is a hypothesis scattered throughout the anthropological literature. An excellent study is Stephen J. Pyne's Fire in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982). See also William M. Denevan, in Annals of the American Association of Geographers (Sept. 1992), cited in William K. Stevens, 'An Eden in Ancient America? Not Really,' The New York Times (March 30, 1993), p. C1.
23. On the hotly debated issue of 'overkill' see Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause, ed. P. S. Martin and H. E. Wright, Jr. . The arguments around whether climatic factors and/or human 'overkilling' led to massive extinctions of some thirty-five genera of Pleistocene mammals are too complex to be dealt with here. See Paul S. Martin, 'Prehistoric Overkill,' in Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause, ed. P. S. Martin and H. E. Wright, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). I have explored some of the arguments in my introduction to the 1991 revised edition of The Ecology of Freedom (Montreal: Black Rose Books). The evidence is still under debate. Mastodons, who were once regarded as environmentally restricted animals, are now known to have been ecologically more flexible and might have been killed off by Paleoindian hunters, possibly with far less compunction than romantic environmentalists would like to believe. I do not contend that hunting alone pushed these large mammals to extermination -- a considerable amount of killing would have been enough. A summary of arroyo drives of bison can be found in Brian Fagan, 'Bison Hunters of the Northern Plains,' Archaeology (May-June 1994), p. 38.
24. Karl W. Butzer, 'No Eden in the New World,' Nature, vol. 82 (March 4, 1993), pp. 15-17.
25. T. Patrick Cuthbert, 'The Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization,' in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill (Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1988); and Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. chapter 5.
26. Clifford Geertz, 'Life on the Edge,' The New York Review of Books, April 7, 1994, p. 3.
27. As William Powers observes, the book 'Black Elk Speaks was published in 1932. There is no trace of Black Elk's Christian life in it.' For a thorough debunking of the current fascination with the Black Elk story, see William Powers, 'When Black Elk Speaks, Everybody Listens,' Social Text, vol. 8, no. 2 (1991), pp. 43-56.
28. Edwin N. Wilmsen, Land Filled With Flies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 127.
29. Wilmsen, Land Filled with Flies, p. 3.
30. Allyn Maclean Stearman, Yuqu': Forest Nomads in a Changing World (Fort Worth and Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1989), p. 23.
31. Stearman, Yuqu', pp. 80-81.
32. Wilmsen, Land Filled with Flies, pp. 235-39 and 303-15.
33. See, for example, Robert J. Blumenschine and John A. Cavallo, 'Scavenging and Human Evolution,' Scientific American (October 1992), pp. 90-96.
34. Paul A. Janssens, Paleopathology: Diseases and Injuries of Prehistoric Man (London: John Baker, 1970).
35. Wood, Human Sickness, p. 20.
36. E. B. Maple, 'The Fifth Estate Enters the 20th Century. We Get a Computer and Hate It!' The Fifth Estate, vol. 28, no. 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 6-7.
37. Quoted in The New York Times, May 7, 1995. Less sanctimonious people than Zerzan have tried to escape the hold of television and take their pleasures with decent music, radio plays, books, and the like. They just don't buy them!
38. Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, ed. James J. Martin, trans. Steven T. Byington (New York: Libertarian Book Club, 1963), part 2, chap. 4, sec. C, 'My Self-Engagement,' p. 352, emphasis added.
39. Friedrich Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense' (1873; fragment), in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Portable Library, 1959), pp. 46-47.
40. Friedrich Nietzsche, fragment 481 (1883-1888), The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 267.
41. James J. Martin, editor's introduction to Stirner, Ego and His Own, p. xviii.
42. Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 135.
43. Kropotkin, 'Anarchism,' Revolutionary Pamphlets, pp. 287, 293.
44. Kropotkin, 'Anarchism,' Revolutionary Pamphlets, pp. 292-93.
45. Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. 89.
I would like to thank my colleague and companion, Janet Biehl, for her invaluable assistance in researching material for and editing this essay.
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