can/should we use the worlds ''surviving'', ''primitive''?  One might better say ''living from wilds'':

Debating the title ''primitive surviving project'' and the project's aims and philosophy:

OUR PROJECT IS ACTUALLY MORE ABOUT

''LIVING FROM THE WILDERNESS'' THAN ABOUT ''SURVIVING''

The (discussable) words ''primitive'' and moreover ''surviving'' have been used in the title of the project so that the volunteers wishing to join our project understand that ''considering modern western values'' such an experience might be considered by some as a survival (see cold conditions and very simple technologies)...

The very delicate use of ''primitive'', anthropologically speaking, might also sound inappropriate, but was chosen here also to refer to the image of daily Stone Age technologies in volunteers mind.

A title for a project is always hard to choose, and here the choice was clearly made to discourage the persons that would not be able to stand the harsh conditions of life (for exemple winter complety outdoor life by -40C...).

WHAT IS OUR PHILOSOPHY IN OPENING THIS PROJECT:

If i opened this project, it was definitely on a philosophical base; the idea that Humans have their place in the Nature as nomadic hunter-gatherers.

I believe that our modern ''agricultural society'' and/or any society system based on a global sedentary accumulation of goods , as it was generally installed all over the world by different Neolithic revolutions, this gigantic change in the human history, is the reason of possession of land, that evolute into the possessing of everything (from land to objects, to humans...). Possessions need to be defended in a martial way, and martial society needs hierarchy and abolition of equality between its members...

So, in Stone Age times and still nowadays, the egalitarian property-less nomadic hunter-gatherers systems were at the opposite philosophy of agricultural neolithic changes.

I believe also that the relation with Nature suddenly changed: After the establishment of settled agricultural villages, humans where not collecting wild foods from Nature any more (like they use to do in paleolithic times), but they were pressing Nature to obey them in their wishes as they were transforming forest into crop fields, changing the face of Nature toward their needs; a complete different rapport compared with the Paleolithic management of wild environments.

As far as nowadays the face of the earth is changed into (with some exceptions) a wast crop field, one of the last thing I believe we can do to reach harmony with Nature involves living in, from and across the few left wilderness open spaces.

The "primitive" skills can be felt as very pleasureful, because they are actions which touch us very far in our collective memory.

They are "ancestral" actions for humans, and able to be called ''natural'', while considering Humans as part of Nature and living from it.

This project could be called a "wilderness living'' project.

The (discussable) words ''primitive'' and moreover ''surviving'' have been used in the title of the project so that the volunteers wishing to join our project understand that ''considering modern western values'' such an experience might be considered by some as a survival (see cold conditions and very simple technologies)...

But the adrenaline and stress that one can read in the word ''surviving'' is somehow completely out of my philosophy that is about initiating volunteers in how to feel good, relaxed and confortable in wild Nature, wich means we are not at all in a kind of Comando-training philosophy.

Our aim is much more about living in and from the wilderness using stone age technologies, than about concrete ''surviving''...

We inscribe into a philosophy of discovering nature, exploring it, eating it, learning how to make ropes, tools, great dinners, clothes...from it. Our aim is to feel good in nature, like at home. To feel like in a kitchen garden in the woods.

I hope that this project will give tools for the participants, to be able to reach more self sufficiency (and be able to DO from nature things that we usually BUY when we need them..), to feel much more skillful and respectful toward Nature, and to be able to feel comfortable "surviving" or better say ''living'' from it.

I hope that this project will inscribe in a philosophy of equality, non possession, non sedentary, knowledge of the environment and its uses, strong link with gifting nature, and learning of our "instinctive" skills.

I want to thank very much Tiina Hokkanen, Miska Sliden, Patrick Franzen, Walter and Lisbeth Sundland, Risto Jarvisalo, Miika Vanhapiha, Ilja Koivisto, Clovis Guilloton, Suvi Kivelä...and i am forgetting names...

Thanks to you this project is happening...

Joseph Favre-Felix