Anarcho-naturism

Anarcho-naturism, also referred to as anarchist naturism and naturist anarchism, appeared in the late 19th century as the union of anarchist and naturist philosophies. In many of the alternative communities established in Britain in the early 1900s, "nudism, anarchism, vegetarianism and free love were accepted as part of a politically radical way of life". In the 1920s, the inhabitants of the anarchist community at Whiteway, near Stroud in Gloucestershire, "shocked the conservative residents of the area with their shameless nudity". Mainly, it had importance within individualist anarchist circles in Spain, France, Portugal and Cuba.

Anarcho-naturism advocates vegetarianism, free love, nudism, hiking and an ecological world view within anarchist groups and outside them. Anarcho-naturism also promotes an ecological worldview, small ecovillages, and most prominently nudism as a way to avoid the artificiality of the industrial mass society of modernity. Naturist individualist anarchists see the individual in their biological, physical and psychological aspects and try to eliminate social determinations.

History

Early influences

An important early influence on anarchist naturism was the thought of Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Élisée Reclus.
Thoreau was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book ''Walden'', a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, '' Civil Disobedience'', an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. His thought is an early influence on green anarchism, but with an emphasis on the individual experience of the natural world, influencing later naturist currents. Simple living as a rejection of a materialist lifestyle and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy. "Many have seen in Thoreau one of the precursors of ecologism and anarcho-primitivism represented today in John Zerzan. For George Woodcock this attitude can be also motivated by certain idea of resistance to progress and of rejection of the growing materialism which is the nature of American society in the mid-19th century." John Zerzan himself included the text "Excursions" (1863) by Thoreau in his edited compilation of anti-civilization writings called ''Against civilization: Readings and reflections'' from 1999.

France

For the influential French anarchist Élisée Reclus, naturism "was at the same time a physical means of revitalization, a rapport with the body completely different from the hypocrisy and taboos which prevailed at the time, a more convivial way to see life in society, and an incentive to respect the planet. Thus naturism develops in France, in particular under the influence of Élisée Reclus, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century among anarchistic communities resulting from utopian socialism."

In France, later important propagandists of anarcho-naturism include Henri Zisly