Wilderness therapy, the practice of sending troubled young people into nature in
order to re-socialize them, poses a paradox. Time spent in wilderness is imagined to produce
civilizing effects on young people, rendering them better prepared to live responsible and
productive lives in society. Study of wilderness therapy, therefore, provides insight into
constructions of youth and nature in contemporary American society.
This thesis emerges from ethnographic research conducted at Camp E-Wen-Akee, a
therapeutic camping program for troubled youth, in Benson, Vermont, USA. In addition to
living with the three groups of campers in their rustic camp sites and engaging in camp
activities, I facilitated two camper-run research projects, and interviewed camp staff
members, and the state social workers responsible for sending adjudicated youth to
residential programs.
I find that camp life is an achievement of many heterogeneous actors, some of whom
are human and others nonhuman. The resulting work is an ethnography of a nature-culture,
wherein I describe how the camp mobilizes various resources to create the conditions for
therapeutic change. The differing nature narratives of campers and the adults indicated that
expectations for nature are at least in part, outcomes of class processes. Close attention to
camp life shows that therapy is a social strategy brought into being at a number of scales: the
material body, built and temporal architectures, landscape, and 'public' wilderness outside of
camp's borders. I find at each scale a tension between the ordering tactics deployed by camp
staff members and resistance posed by campers and 'nature' alike.
Campers' identities are meant to change as a result o f repeated performances of prosocial
behavior, and the on-going circulation of success stories. Together these practices
underscore that what one person does always has effects on others. The irony uncovered i n
this research is that while troubled youth are sent to a nature imagined as separate from
society, Camp E-Wen-Akee provides young people with an ecological model for social life.
Wilderness therapy is the outcome not of a separation between nature and society, but of ongoing
relations between the two. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/18281 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Dunkley, Cheryl Morse |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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