At the opening of Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, perhaps the premier anarcho- primitivist text, Fredy Perlman remarks:

"This is the place to jump, the place to dance! This is the wilderness! Was there ever any other?"

This seemingly innocuous point encapsulates a key aspect of anarcho-primitivism: the sense that the primitive is here and now, rather than far away and long ago. Perlman suggests that his notion is "the big public secret" in civilization:

"It remains a secret. It is publicly known but not avowed. Publicly the wilderness is elsewhere, barbarism is abroad, savagery is on the face of the other."

But Perlman knows better than this and, perhaps as a result of his insight, so do we. And this knowledge is crucial. For in asserting the presence of the primitive, even in the midst of the megamachine, Perlman is marking the difference between anarcho-primitivism and other forms of primitivism in the West. And, furthermore, he is reclaiming a primitive identity for those trapped inside Leviathan. This is a crucial activity.
In Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, a survey of twentieth century Western appropriations of the primitive, Marianna Torgovnick writes:

"The metaphor of finding a home or being at home recurs over and over as a structuring pattern within Western primitivism. Going primitive is trying to ’go home’ to a place that feels comfortable and balanced, where full acceptance comes freely and easily ... Whatever form the primitive’s hominess takes, its strangeness salves our estrangement from ourselves and our culture" (p.185).

Superficially, this seems an attractive idea and one conducive to anarcho-primitivism. A linkage of the primitive with origins seems a logical one in the West. Living lives of profound alienation in civilization as we do, the idea of going home, going primitive, seems appealing. This notion of a journey back to the primitive as a passage back to origins is echoed in the title of a recent volume edited by Ron Sakolsky and James Koehnline: Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture. As the book’s opening page explains,

"The first "drop-outs" from English colonization in North America left the ’Lost Colony’ of Roanoke and went to join the natives at Croatan."

However, in making this linkage, radicals such as Sakolsky and Koehnline are unwittingly aligning themselves with notions of the primitive that are endemic in the West — notions that are used to underpin racism and imperialism.
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