This book is an invitation to look outside ourselves: it doesn’t explore wilderness itself, but rather the relationship between human and non-human that we are made of.

One day James Clifford, one of the best known contemporary anthropologists, was invited by his friend Jean-Marie Tjibaou, a Kanak from New Caledonia, to visit his native tribe. At some point, from the top of the hill, Clifford saw some dwellings in the middle of the forest. “Where is your home?” he asked. Tjibaou looked at him, opened his palm, inviting him to look at the landscape as a whole, and said: ‘C’est ça la maison!’. As to say that home is outside of us: it is the set of relationships we have with humans and other living beings who share the earth with us. It may seem extravagant to speak of the wild in the age of the Anthropocene: yet through journeys and stories, islands and forests, volcanoes and coral reefs, Adriano Favole tells us very well about situations in the world where the boundary between the cultivated and the wild is very thin indeed. In fact, if it is undeniable that we humans are culture, it is equally undeniable that we are also the wild and that we live mainly through interactions with non-humans such as oxygen, viruses and bacteria that live inside us. An eye-opening read that brings us out of the opposition between nature and culture that has colonised our minds.