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{{Short description|Anarchist school of thought}}{{anarchism sidebar|schools}}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".WEB,weblink Nudism the radical tradition, Terry Phillips,weblink 2012-09-11, dead, Mainly, it had importance within individualist anarchist circles{{refn|WEB,weblink El movimiento libertario en Italia, 2013-08-31, bot: unknown,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20131012054206weblink">weblink 2013-10-12, JOURNAL,weblink La insumisión voluntaria: El anarquismo individualista español durante la Dictadura y la Segunda República (1923–1938), Xavier, Díez, Germinal, 1 April 2006, 41,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20130618051019weblink">weblink 2013-06-18, WEB, Anarchisme et naturisme, aujourd'hui, Ytak, Cathy, Naturisme et Anarchisme, 2000, 2016-07-14,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20070609184510weblink">weblinkweblink 2007-06-09, fr, }} in Spain,JOURNAL, - La cultura de la naturaleza en el anarquismo iberico y cubano, Bracons, Eduard Masjuan, Signos Históricos, 2006, 15, 2016-07-13,weblink es, 1665-4420, France,WEB, Recension des articles de l'En-Dehors consacrés au naturisme et au nudisme, Armand, E., Naturisme et Anarchisme, 2006, 2016-07-14,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20081014165702weblink">weblinkweblink 2008-10-14, fr, PortugalJOURNAL, Anarchisme et naturisme au Portugal, dans les années 1920, Les Anarchistes du Portugal, João, Freire, Confédération nationale du travail, 2002, and Cuba.BOOK, Anarchism and countercultural politics in early twentieth-century Cuba, Shaffer, Kirwin R., Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2005, 0813027918,weblink 2011-05-06,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20160305043620weblink">weblink 2016-03-05, dead, 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.{{citation|url=http://www.soliobrera.org/pdefs/cuaderno4.pdf |title=El Naturismo Libertario (1890–1939) |first= Jose Maria |last=Roselló|work=Cuaderno de Pensamiento|date=2005|issue=4|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160102181805weblink|archive-date=2016-01-02}}

History

Early influences

An important early influence on anarchist naturism was the thought of Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Élisée Reclus.WEB,weblink The pioneers, 2013-10-11, dead,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20121025125935weblink">weblink 2012-10-25, File:Walden Thoreau.jpg|180px|thumb|left|Walden by Henry David Thoreau, an influential early eco-anarchisteco-anarchist 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. 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."

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 ZislyENCYCLOPEDIA, Zisly, Henri (1872–1945), Boni, Stefano, Immanuel Ness, The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest : International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 2009, 2016-07-11,weblink 9781405184649, and Émile Gravelle who collaborated in La Nouvelle Humanité, Le Naturien, Le Sauvage, L'Ordre Naturel, and La Vie Naturelle.WEB,weblink The daily bleed, 2015-05-20, bot: unknown,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20160701210750weblink">weblink 2016-07-01, Their ideas were important in individualist anarchist circles in France as well as Spain, where Federico Urales (pseudonym of Joan Montseny) promoted the ideas of Gravelle and Zisly in La Revista Blanca (1898–1905).WEB, Los origenes del naturismo libertario, The origins of Libertarian Naturism, Morán, Agustín, La Garbancita Ecologica, 12 June 2011, 2016-07-14,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20110612063030weblink">weblink 2011-06-12,weblink es, dead, Richard D. Sonn comments on the influence of naturist views in the wider French anarchist movement:}}

Henri Zisly

Henri Zisly (born in Paris, November 2, 1872; died in 1945)Henri Zisly page; from the Daily Bleed's Anarchist Encyclopedia {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121005232808weblink |date=2012-10-05 }} was a French individualist anarchist and naturist. He participated alongside Henri Beylie and Émile Gravelle in many journals such as La Nouvelle Humanité and La Vie Naturelle, which promoted anarchist-naturism. In 1902, he was one of the main initiators, alongside Georges Butaud and Sophie Zaïkowska, of the cooperative Colonie de Vaux established in Essômes-sur-Marne, in Aisne.Zisly's political activity, "primarily aimed at supporting a return to 'natural life' through writing and practical involvement, stimulated lively confrontations within and outside the anarchist environment. Zisly vividly criticized progress and civilization, which he regarded as 'absurd, ignoble, and filthy.' He openly opposed industrialization, arguing that machines were inherently authoritarian, defended nudism, advocated a non-dogmatic and non-religious adherence to the 'laws of nature,' recommended a lifestyle based on limited needs and self-sufficiency, and disagreed with vegetarianism, which he considered 'anti-scientific.'"

Spain

This relationship between anarchism and naturism was quite important at the end of the 1920s in Spain:WEB, History: Anachy and Naturism, Ortega, Carlos, Naturismo.org Magazine, Winter 2003, Madrid Naturist Association, 2016-07-11,weblink {{cquote|The linking role played by the Sol y Vida group was very important. The goal of this group was to take trips and enjoy the open air. The Naturist athenaeum, Ecléctico, in Barcelona, was the base from which the activities of the group were launched. First Etica and then Iniciales, which began in 1929, were the publications of the group, which lasted until the Spanish Civil War. We must be aware that the naturist ideas expressed in them matched the desires that the libertarian youth had of breaking up with the conventions of the bourgeoisie of the time. That is what a young worker explained in a letter to Iniciales. He writes it under the odd pseudonym of silvestre del campo (wild man in the country). "I find great pleasure in being naked in the woods, bathed in light and air, two natural elements we cannot do without. By shunning the humble garment of an exploited person, (garments which, in my opinion, are the result of all the laws devised to make our lives bitter), we feel there no others left but just the natural laws. Clothes mean slavery for some and tyranny for others. Only the naked man who rebels against all norms, stands for anarchism, devoid of the prejudices of outfit imposed by our money-oriented society."}} Isaac Puente, an influential Spanish anarchist during the 1920s and 1930s and an important propagandist of anarcho-naturism,{{citation|url=http://www.cgt.es/telecomunicaciones/ateneo/isaac_puente_comunismo_libertario.pdf|author= Isaac Puente. |title=El Comunismo Libertario y otras proclamas insurreccionales y naturistas}}BOOK, Iñiguez, Miguel, Anarquismo y naturismo: el caso de Isaac Puente,weblink 2004, Asociación Isaac Puente, was a militant of both the CNT anarcho-syndicalist trade union and Iberian Anarchist Federation. He published the book El Comunismo Libertario y otras proclamas insurreccionales y naturistas (en:Libertarian Communism and other insurrectionary and naturist proclaims) in 1933, which sold around 100,000 copies,{{rp|4}} and wrote the final document for the Extraordinary Confederal Congress of Zaragoza of 1936 which established the main political line for the CNT for that year.BOOK, El anarquismo individualista en España (1923-1938), Diez, Xavier, Barcelona, Virus, 2007, 2016-07-13,weblink 978-84-96044-87-6, Puente was a doctor who approached his medical practice from a naturist point of view. He saw naturism as an integral solution for the working classes, alongside Neo-Malthusianism, and believed it concerned the living being while anarchism addressed the social being. He believed capitalist societies endangered the well-being of humans from both a socioeconomic and sanitary viewpoint, and promoted anarcho-communism alongside naturism as a solution.This ecological tendency in Spanish anarchism was strong enough as to call the attention of the CNT–FAI in Spain. Daniel Guérin in Anarchism: From Theory to Practice reports:}}

Cuba

The historian Kirwin R. Schaffer in his study of Cuban anarchism reports anarcho-naturism as "[a] third strand within the island's anarchist movement" alongside anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism. Naturism offered a global alternative health and lifestyle movement. Naturists focused on redefining one's life to live simply, to eat cheap but nutritious vegetarian diets, and to raise one's own food if possible. The countryside was posited as a romantic alternative to urban living, and some naturists even promoted what they saw as the healthful benefits of nudism. Globally, the naturist movement counted anarchists, liberals, and socialists as its followers. However, in Cuba a particular "anarchist" dimension evolved led by people like Adrián del Valle, who spearheaded the Cuban effort to shift naturism's focus away from only individual health to naturism having a "social emancipatory" function."Schaffer reports the influence that anarcho-naturism had outside naturist circles. So "[f]or instance, nothing inherently prevented an anarcho-syndicalist in the Havana restaurant workers' union from supporting the alternative health care programs of the anarcho-naturists and seeing those alternative practices as 'revolutionary.'". "Anarcho-naturists promoted a rural ideal, simple living, and being in harmony with Nature as ways to save the laborers from the increasingly industrialized character of Cuba. Besides promoting an early twentieth-century "back-to-the-land" movement, they used these romantic images of Nature to illustrate how far removed a capitalist industrialized Cuba had departed from an anarchist view of natural harmony." The main propagandizer in Cuba of anarcho-naturism was the Catalonia born "Adrián del Valle (aka Palmiro de Lidia)...Over the following decades, Del Valle became a constant presence in not only the anarchist press that proliferated in Cuba but also mainstream literary publications...From 1912 to 1913 he edited the freethinking journal El Audaz. Then he began his largest publishing job by helping to found and edit the monthly alternative health magazine that followed the anarcho-naturist line Pro-Vida.

Other countries

Naturism also met anarchism in the United Kingdom. "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."In Italy, during the IX Congress of the Italian Anarchist Federation in Carrara in 1965, a group decided to split off from this organization and created the Gruppi di Iniziativa Anarchica. In the seventies it mostly comprised "veteran individualist anarchists with a pacifism orientation, naturism, etc,...".

See also

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• Adamites
• Anarcho-primitivism
• Eco-communalism
• Freedomites
• Green anarchism
• Individualist anarchism in Europe
• Lebensreform
• Lifestyle anarchism
• Naturism

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References

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Further reading

• BOOK, Cleminson, Richard, Sarah Toulalan, Kate Fisher, The Routledge History of Sex and the Body: 1500 to the Present,weblink 2013, Routledge, 978-1-136-74435-8, Medical Understandings of the Body,
• BOOK, Cleminson, Richard, Anarchism, science, and sex: eugenics in eastern Spain, 1900-1937,weblink 2000, P. Lang, 978-3-906765-57-0,
• JOURNAL, Cleminson, Richard, Making sense of the body: anarchism, nudism and subjective experience, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 81, 6, 2004, 697–716, 1475-3820, 10.1080/1475382042000272256, 143076783,
• BOOK, Josep Maria, Rosello, !Viva la Naturaleza! Escritos libertarios contra la civilización, el progreso y la ciencia, Virus editorial, 2008, 978-84-96044-94-4, es,

External links

• La Iconoclasta (the Iconoclast). Contemporary spanish anarcho-naturist magazine

{{Anarchism}}{{Nudity}}