THE NEW PRIMITIVES: IDENTITY, LANDSCAPE AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN THE MYTHOPOETIC MEN'S MOVEMENT

This paper explores the beliefs and practices of the mythopoetic men's movement. More specifically, it focuses on the movement's adherents' representations of “racial” identity and wilderness. After introducing the movement, I argue that, a) the mythopoetic men's movement creatively reworks colonialist fantasies of non-Western societies and landscapes, and b) that this process acts to naturalize the movement's adherents' contradictory experiences of power. The paper concludes with some observations on primitivist cultural appropriation.