Learning Mutual Aid: The Environmental Anthropologies of Early Anarchist Geographers

Challenging widespread racism and determinism in the European “science” of their day, early anarchist geographers Elisée (1830–1905) and Elie Reclus (1827–1904), Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), Lev Mechnikov/Léon Metchnikoff (1838–1888) and others addressed so-called “first peoples” on planes of equality and empathy, considering them as possible inspirations in egalitarianism and mutual aid. Their elaborations especially aimed at popular pedagogy, in the context of anarchist understandings that knowledge could be a challenge to religious or secular dogmas and a defence of individual freedom through freethought and critical consciousness. In this sense, the “early anarchist geographers” refers to authors who were not only scholars, but also activists at the origin of both geography as a scholarly discipline and anarchist communism as a political doctrine and historical movement, as discussed by a rich literature in anarchist geographies