2025 Theses Doctoral

Civilization’s Discontents: Building Worlds Beyond Colonial Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest

Thompsett, Fern

This study analyzes the world-building practices of anti-civilizationists, a loose network of predominantly white and working-class people based in the Pacific Northwest. Anti-civilizationists identify ‘civilizations’—defined as a large-scale, stratified, agricultural societies dependent on the domestication of nonhuman beings—as wellsprings of social and ecological oppression. Inspired by anthropological theories of non-agrarian lifeways, they seek to develop egalitarian, multispecies communities with the aim of disavowing capitalism, coloniality and state power. To this end, some form small, land-based communities in which to collectively work toward non-hierarchical social relations, and material self-sufficiency disengaged from agro-industrial economies. Meanwhile, many seek to support Indigenous sovereignty as people aware of their positions as settlers. However, attempting to live outside of ‘civilization’ in the contemporary Pacific Northwest is a complex undertaking, and proponents navigate everyday life within and without the systems they seek to refuse.

This dissertation draws from 24 months of fieldwork in two rural anti-civilizationist communities located in different parts of western Washington state, and a network of theorists and proponents based in Eugene, Oregon. I use participant observation and semi-structured interviews to document and analyze their diverse attempts to build worlds beyond contemporary civilization. Through these combined research methods, I focus specifically on anti-civilizationists’ efforts to: live autonomously from the state and capitalism, foster egalitarian social and ecological relations, and support Indigenous sovereignty. Further, I examine how anthropological literatures are selected, interpreted and incorporated within this milieu.

This research demonstrates that anti-civilizationists often use and repurpose aspects of the structures they seek to ultimately abandon, in order to build their alternative worlds. In creative and complex ways, they navigate spaces in between their political ideals and the compromised conditions of the present. I investigate how this plays out specifically through property relations, work systems, regional questions of decolonization, and shifts toward animist ontologies.

This research carries implications for understanding how potentialities emerge within the interstices of dominant structures in ways that support, rather than negate, their political horizons; how the reworking of more-than-human relationalities extends from the ethical to the ontological realm; and how settler movements for autonomy grapple with coloniality, and with how they can best support Indigenous sovereignty. Moreover, this work demonstrates how readers of anthropology outside of the academy draw from anthropological theories to scaffold their imaginaries of alternative ways of living within the here and now.