MSc Bushcraft Studies

Overview

Bushcraft refers to the skills and knowledge that humans need to survive in wild environments with access to only minimal tools. For most of our existence on this planet this knowledge was passed down the generations and formed the basic parameters for childhood socialization. Children learned how to make tools from naturally occurring materials, how to read the landscape around them, how to make and control different kinds of fire and how to make a variety of more or less permanent shelters. Decades of work by ethnoecologists and botanists has now revealed the complexity of hunter-gatherer knowledge of the natural world. Through painstaking reconstruction archaeologists and anthropologists are revealing corresponding sophistication in the nuanced deployment and adjustment of apparently simple technologies (such as the use of fire). This course will combine a practical immersion in field bushcraft knowledge and techniques with academic modules in ecology, ethnobotany and ecological anthropology.

Studied over a year and in the context of a living community, with reference to aspects of social anthropology, the course will also provide opportunities for students to explore the ritualistic and solidarity-building opportunities that are intrinsic to the application of all the human technologies in a particular social context.

The practical training will equip students with a comprehensive foundation in essential bushcraft and survival skills. The emphasis throughout is on the development of self-reliance, self-confidence and a deep and sustained process of reflection on the our relationship with the natural world, both as individuals, as communities and as a species.

Indicative Modules

• Wilderness and Civilisation
• Introduction to Ecological Anthropology
• Human Ecology
• Social Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers
• Principles of Ethnobotany
• Field Botany
• Dissertation

Skills training

• Navigation
• Shelter
• Fire making
• Primitive fishing
• Hunting and trapping
• The use of modern cutting tools
• Flint knapping and primitive stone tools
• Plants for food
• Food processing techniques
• Plants for medicine
• Water storage and purification
• Hygiene and toilet
• Cordage skills
• Craft skills: basketry, paddle making, boat building
• Bows and Atlatls (the 'stone age Kalashnikov')

Expeditions

Students will also have the opportunity to undertake two fourteen day summer and winter expeditions. These will provide an opportunity to practice learned skills in more extreme environments and to learn new ones.