Kith

Jay Griffiths soared away on a seven-year pilgrimage to forage for the knowledge that illuminated her book Wild. She spent a lot of time with wild tribes, and with conquered people who still had beautiful memories of wildness and freedom. As she bounced from place to place, both modern and indigenous, she became aware of a glaring difference between wild people and the dominant culture — their children.This presented her with a perplexing riddle. “Why are so many children in Euro-American cultures unhappy? Why is it that children in many traditional cultures seem happier, fluent in their child-nature?” Her dance with this riddle gave birth to her book, Kith.Griffiths is English, and the book’s title refers to the old phrase, “kith and kin.” Kin means close family. Kith originally meant knowledge or native land, the home outside the house. When peasants lived on the land, their knowledge was rooted in the living place around them, not in mysterious juju like mathematics, economics, or engineering. In recent centuries, most peasants have been driven out of their home, and their traditional knowledge has been forgotten. Today, the meaning of kith has been reduced to extended family and neighbors.Like “sustainable,” kith was once a beautiful word of great importance, now reduced to a toothless ghost. Both words are lifesavers, if we could just remember them. They are not forever lost. Griffiths reminds us that “the past is not behind us, but within us.”In this book, kith is used in its ancient form, a sacred word of power. Why are kids so unhappy? They have no kith. They are dreadfully impoverished. In our society, kids (and adults) are unwell because they have largely been exiled from nature. They live indoors in manmade environments. Nature is an essential nutrient for health and sanity. Kith is life.Griffiths and her brothers spent much of their youth playing outdoors, wandering across the land, getting wet and dirty, without adult supervision. They rarely watched television. She fears that her generation may be the last to experience the remaining vestiges of a normal childhood. But I think that the game will change radically after the lights go out. Mass insanity may not be our closing act. After the plague comes healing.Evolution prepared our species for a life of hunting and foraging. All infants born today are wild animals fine-tuned for thriving outdoors in a tropical climate, surrounded by wild flora and fauna. Being surrounded by nature is what all animals require for a normal and healthy life. Like all other animals, young humans need to explore, play, learn. Children need nature like fish need water. They need a place where they belong, a home, a land that will be “mentor, teacher, and parent.”They need to grow up in lands that still have their original parts — deer, birds, snakes, frogs, coyotes — our relatives who have not forgotten how to live. They have so much to teach us. Pets are unacceptable replacements for our wild and free relatives. Cities are unacceptable substitutes for healthy places to live. Zoo animals have miserable lives. Confinement in industrial civilization is devastating for tropical primates of all ages.Several centuries back, Griffiths’ ancestors lived in villages near commons. The commons were open lands where the people could hunt, fish, pick berries, gather wood, and graze livestock. Today, the commons are nearly extinct. They have been eliminated by a process called enclosure, whereby wealthy lords fenced off the commons, replaced forests with sheep pastures, evicted most peasants, and burned down their humble cottages.Enclosure is the diabolical anti-kith. Modern kids no longer have abundant open spaces in which they can mature in a healthy manner. Space has been enclosed and denatured. So has freedom, the essence of childhood. They are no longer free to spend their days wandering where whimsy leads them. Modern childhood is now rigidly scheduled.Community has also been enclosed. Kids used to be raised in villages where there were no strangers. Kids were mentored and parented by neighbors and extended family. Modern kids grow up in a world of automobiles, strangers, and nuclear families. Outdoors, behind every bush, are tweakers, psychopaths, perverts, and predators. Kids spend much of their lives under house arrest.Kids have immense interest in learning, but we give them “a school system that is half factory, half prison, and too easily ignores the very education which children crave.” They major in obedience, punctuality, self-centeredness, and the myths of civilization. They spend their childhood years indoors, in classrooms, and graduate knowing nearly nothing about the ecosystem they inhabit, their kith.This is quite different from how children in traditional societies are raised. Wild children are in constant human contact until they learn to walk, some sleep with their parents for the first five years or so. They are never left alone to cry themselves to sleep. They are never scolded, beaten, or given commands. They are socialized, respected, treated like adults. Socialization teaches them to be respectful of others, and nurture good relationships. They develop confidence and self-reliance.Importantly, wild cultures do an excellent job of guiding youths through a healthy transition into adults. Every person is born with a unique personality. We all have different gifts, interests, and destinies — trackers, herbalists, counselors, scouts, singers, dancers, drummers, shamans, storytellers, healers, slackers, morons, lunatics.Elders carefully help youths find their paths in life. “Every child needs their time in the woods, to find their vision or their dream. Yet most children today have no such rite, no way of negotiating that difficult transition into adulthood.”The first generation of enclosure victims were painfully aware of all they had lost. Their city born descendants have little or no awareness of the lost treasure of kith, and the harsh poverty of their consumer prosperity. They are “denied their role as part of the wildlife.” Many may go to their graves without ever experiencing the beauty that is the sacred birthright of tropical primates, and every other living thing.Griffiths learned to talk and read at a very early age. She has a great passion for words and learning. You get the impression that she has read 10 or 20 books a week since she was crawling around in nappies. She writes with flourish and flamboyance. Kith is not an instruction manual for childrearing, but it provides a wealth of important insights for tropical primates who live in modern society. It’s an excellent companion to Jean Liedloff’s masterpiece, The Continuum Concept.

This is an extremely comprehensive writing on the emotional needs of children, their well-being and route to becoming good, happy and productive adults. Griffiths' research is extensive, her attention to detail, admirable and very enhancing. Historical information abounds. Her easy and intelligent writing style makes it a joy to read; I have enjoyed other of her books and writings in 'Orion' magazine for several years and think even more of her since reading this work. Her subject matter is notably varied, her interests renaissance.

Transaction was smooth, product exactly as described.

I have not finished the book, but i weave her anecdotes into my nite dreams and I have recommended it to many as Griffiths is one of my most esteemed writers/people and this topic is essential for us all to understand and consider.

Thought provoking alternative view of childhood in today's western civilisation compared to andre cultures/other times. Particularly interesting to read about the origins and goals of school as an institution.

This is a beautiful book: and a timely one too.Just as there is an economic crisis in the western world, so there is a parenting one, mostly out of sight behind closed doors but nonetheless very real - and with daunting implications for the future generation. The loss of a sense of wonder, the way children are now bombarded with adult material in the media, the proliferation of programmes like Supernanny which attempt to deal with parenting problems, the vilification in the media of 'delinquent' teenagers... all these are symptoms of childhood in some way maladjusted and out of kilter. These themes (and many others) are discussed with great honesty and feeling in this wonderful kaleidoscope of a book.You may be familiar with the English expression 'kith and kin' - kin being one's relatives, and kith? One's surroundings, homeland and friends. That's what I take it to mean, anyway: encompassing all these things, and naturally varying greatly from one country to another. The author makes some eye-opening comparisons, and points out that the majority of children in the west today are at once neglected and over-protected, shut away in bedrooms and schoolrooms and weighed down by the unrealistic expectations of an older generation, motivated mostly by the money imperative - and the fantasies of international mega-stardom.When you read this book, you have the feeling that every sentence has been carefully pondered and every word chosen for the right resonance. Indeed, everything flows seamlessly and effortlessly: obviously the writer must take great pains to achieve this! The wit and style of Ms Griffiths' previous works like Pip Pip and Wild come through yet again, unmistakably; if you have read those, you will know... if not, you will want to! In essence, her writing runs like a clear, sparkling river, one that you can return to and luxuriate in, over and over again.

Deeply poetic as well as admirably well informed, the way that Griffiths brings together the strands of the ways in which we have been dispossessed of our "acre" in which we should live move and have our being, dispossessed of experiences and bonds and natural metaphors for our internal processes, experiences that build internal resilience, is something that succeeeds in provoking deep grief and deep anger. I had to take it quite slowly at times. High on highlighting causes and low on blaming individuals for the failings of their culture, this devastating book deserves to become an absolute classic, and should be required reading for anyone who is even remotely interested in Forest Schools or indeed the rate of self harm and suicide, and addiction amongst young people and .......actually anyone who cares about the soul of our culture.

In the early 1950s I had a wild childhood. I lived in Bristol, a blitzed city. Everywhere there were "bombsites". They were Buddleja jungles. Also known as butterfly bushes. Buddleja grows naturally on scree slopes and the rubble strewn blitzed out areas where a perfect habitat. As children we ran wild in these butterfly jungles. This wild childhood was a natural childhood of open space and play and most of all of imagination.Jay Griffiths seems to have a grasp of this. I found here style unfamiliar as my main reading is in economics and finance. It took me a few pages to acclimatise to the unfamiliarity until I went in reverie back to those "bombsites". Strangely it was not until the age of 11 that it dawned on me that these sites were where bombs had destroyed buildings and lives and was horrified by the discovery. This did not however deter my from these wonderful places of play.These days my only writing is poetry and to write poerty I take my mind on a quest back to memories of those wonderful jungles within an old city. Thanks to them my imagination has not withered on the vane strivings of economic life.Thank you Jay Griffith for a useful return trip to a happy part of childhood.

I was in a Sámi hut in Northern Norway, in a disparate group gathered around a fire, listening to stories. A local man stood up, and announced that he was leaving but wasn’t going to say goodbye. “When Sámi go out into their landscape” he said, “we do not need to say goodbye – because we are still at home”.His comment resonates strongly with the ideas explored by Jay Griffiths in this compelling and impassioned polemic. Kith is a concept now largely forgotten, but which should, she argues, be at the centre of our lives. It relates to our natural space, our personal habitat, our way of living in relation to landscape and the natural world. It is what that Sámi man called “home”.Most reviewers of Kith have concentrated less on this title, and more on the subtitle – The Riddle of the Childscape. As a result, Kith has tended to be reviewed as if it is a book primarily about childhood – an answer to the “riddle” Griffiths poses at the outset of her discussion: why are contemporary Western children so unhappy? But to treat the book as a sociological investigation of childhood is to miss the point. Kith is not really about childhood in that sense at all. It’s about kith.In fact, there are very few ‘real’, contemporary children in the book at all. The children Griffiths discusses are either fictional (Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Philip Pullman’s Lyra, Alice, Dickens’s numerous young heroes and heroines, adventurers in Narnia) or the carefully re-constructed childhood selves of Romantic writers (Wordsworth, Clare, and Griffiths herself). Kith is an exploration of childhood not as a current lived experience but as a phenomenon in cultural history. It deals with the relationship between the social and cultural construction of childhood and the concomitant construction (or perhaps, destruction) of landscape and kith.Enclosure, the inexorable process by which Western culture has asserted private ownership over common land, and simultaneously constrained the literal and imaginative wanderings and wonderings of creative minds both young and older, is at the core of the book. Griffiths’ chapter on John Clare is particularly powerful, and she places herself in the lineage of this most sensitive of rural poets and radical fighters against enclosure – bravely so, given the tragedy of Clare’s later life. We must, she seems to say, be brave enough to be considered insane, if we are to deal with the insane social boundaries that enclose us.Edward Bond, our greatest living playwright and the first authentic rural voice in British theatre since Shakespeare, also wrote about Clare in his play The Fool – and has argued, like Griffiths, that “we evolved in a biosphere but live in a technosphere”. Bond’s argument, in his Preface to Lear, is that the disjuncture between the human animal and its kith is what explains the irrational violence which has come to define human behaviour in late capitalism. Griffiths would agree with him. Indeed, the most important sections of her book are those which chart the ways in which enclosure and capitalism have asserted themselves over different classes and different cultures through actions of astonishing brutality. She catalogues the appalling violence perpetrated against children from indigenous cultures in the name of “progress” – the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal Australians, the systematic abuse of Native children in the Canadian Residential Schools. “Civilization” (the word is derived from the Latin for “city”) is about removing people from the land, systematically destroying their culture, deliberately suppressing their imaginations.It’s neo-imperialist ideology, not Griffiths, that aligns non-Western cultures with childhood and so infantilises the indigenous. Not, I suspect, that Griffiths or the indigenous people whose cultures she so admires would particularly mind. For me, the danger in Griffiths’ argument is not so much that it infantilises the indigenous, as that it could be seen to follow the very Western paradigm to which it apparently objects. Her narrative of a world in which humanity lived innocent and child-like in relation to nature, until capitalism came along and shut us out of the garden, reads very like a Judeo-Christian account of the Fall. That doesn’t invalidate it, of course, and Griffiths acknowledges that as a Western writer she is bound to carry within her some of the very thought structures she seeks to question and to overthrow – but I would have liked to see a more honest confrontation of this, and an engagement with indigenous perspectives on the same question. The Cree writer Tomson Highway has written brilliantly about the Judeo-Christian lapsarian narrative from an indigenous perspective: arguing that original sin was never a concept in Native American culture, and that therefore the “untamed” landscapes of his own kith, Northern Canada, represent an ongoing relationship with natural space that is a form of Eden: “we are still in the garden”. His ideas would sit well with Griffiths’ argument, and counter the possible objection that she follows, or imposes, Western structures.I need hardly say that Kith is intensely provocative. That’s the point. The case it makes, building on her previous work, the brilliant Wild, is extreme. It is also irrefutable. And it begs the question that I hope Griffiths may address in her next book – now that we find ourselves in this appalling mess, what can we do? How do we fight our way back to a relationship with nature? How do we stop prioritising “economic growth”, and create a space for the personal growth, imaginative and spiritual, of our children?So far, this sad, clear-sighted author has only begged these questions, not answered them.

Essential reading full stop!Beautifully written and easy to read, this book speaks to the depths of your soul, where you know truth is being spoken. Some would label me a middle class English Mum (if it is their want to label), and this is the world Jay is writing about; fear riddled adults as good as incarcerating children, blind to the damage this treatment can cause to long term mental, emotional and physical health.As individuals we have much work to do in changing the way we think. Only when we achieve this will we be able to give children what they really need in order to be healthy in all respects and this book is a kick start, clarion call to wake up and do that essential work! Thank you Jay, wise, wise soul.

for those who know about (or want to know more about!) all ages of people (including children!). It puts emphasis on the whole person (quite refreshing for me as I'm used to Mr Gove's pontifications about 'raising standards' of only those things that can be measured and quantified!)