Preppers, and What Inspires Them (original) (raw)
Related papers
Disaster Prepper: Health, Identity, and American Survivalist Culture
Human Organization, 2014
The survivalist movement in the United States has spawned the "disaster prep" phenomenon and has become a lifestyle and identity with potential health-related consequences. "Preppers" anticipate either a natural or man-made apocalypse which will result in the total collapse of civil society, prompting them to "prep" by securing places to shelter during the chaos and stockpiling their homes with food, water, fuel, medicine, and supplies. The purpose of this article was to document the impact of survivalist identity upon health-related decision making and health-seeking behavior, as well as examine the identity building and community formation processes as they unfold in virtual contexts. Data were collected from publicly available survivalism and the Prepper web logs (blogs). Results included discussion about the maintenance of chronic conditions, ethical dilemmas regarding medical dependency, and anticipatory changes to health behavior, with implication...
European Journal of Personality, 2019
Post-apocalyptic scenarios provide the basis for popular television shows, video games, and books. These scenarios may be popular because people have their own beliefs and visions about the apocalypse and the need to prepare. The prevalence of such beliefs might also hold societal relevance and serve as a type of projective test of personality. However, there are no quantitative accounts of post-apocalyptic or prepping beliefs. As such, we conducted seven studies (N total = 1034) to do so. In Studies 1 and 2, we developed a post-apocalyptic and prepping beliefs scale, explored its correlates, and confirmed its structure and psychometric properties. In Study 3, we attempted to activate a 'prepper' mindset and further explore the correlates of the new scale. In Studies 4 and 5, we investigated covariations in daily feelings, thoughts, and events, and prepping beliefs. In Studies 6a and 6b, we compared scores from 'real' preppers and to a non-prepping group. Overall, we found that post-apocalyptic concerns and prepping beliefs are predictive of low agreeableness and humility, paranoia, cynicism, conspiracy mentality, conservatism, and social dominance orientation. We also found that increased belief in the need to prep is associated with God-belief, negative daily experiences, and global political events.
Preparing for a world without markets: legitimising strategies of preppers
Journal of Marketing Management
'Prepping'the storing of food, water and weapons as well as the development of self-sufficiency skills for the purpose of independently surviving disastersis an emerging market as well as an expression of generalised anxiety about existential threats (e.g. technological collapse and catastrophic climate change). Whilst accounts of eccentric prepping are common in mainstream media, there is little empirical investigation into how consumers imagine and prepare for a temporary or permanent halt to functioning market systems, and with it, a consumer society. A netnography of European preppers reveals prepping to be an anticipatory mode of practicing for a post-market, post-consumer society before it becomes a reality. We find that preparation is a struggle for cognitive legitimacy through four different modes: vulnerabilising the market, common-sensing market signals, othering civilian consumers and unblackboxing objects.
The man-pocalpyse: Doomsday Preppers and the rituals of apocalyptic manhood
Text and Performance Quarterly
This essay argues that recent male performances of disaster preparedness in reality television recuperate a preindustrial model of hegemonic masculinity by staging the plausible “real world” conditions under which manly skills appear necessary for collective survival. Representations of masculinity in uncertain times intensify the masculinity-in-crisis motif to cultivate anticipation of an apocalyptic event that promises a final resolution to male alienation. An examination of Nat Geo’s Doomsday Preppers illustrates how these staged performances of everyday life cultivate a dangerous vision of apocalyptic manhood that consummates a fantasy of national virility in the demise of feminine society.
Ethnography, 2024
In France today, an increasing number of people consider themselves to be “survivalists”. Presuming an inevitable crisis, they are organizing themselves to acquire and develop the skills, techniques, and knowledge they believe are necessary to survive the potential dissipation of mainstream ways of life. Based on ethnographic data collected in the Southwest of France, this article aims at understanding the motivations surrounding “preparedness” – as well as the discourses it generates and the practices it engenders – by repositioning them within the political and social context in which they emerge. For the most part, French survivalists develop traditional anti-liberal discourses, values, and practices, wherein notions of disaster, or collapse are used as vehicles to promote a conservative political agenda. However, for some, prepping may also be a way to confront a feeling of the degradation of their lives, transforming survivalism into a paradoxical way of re/affirming one’s place in the world.
(Invisible) Displays of Survivalist Intensive Motherhood among UK Brexit Preppers
Sociology
This article explores mothers’ narratives of ‘prepping’ behaviours. Prepping involves the management of stockpiled household items in anticipation of marketplace disruption. In this article, we use anticipated food shortages following the UK’s exit from the EU (‘Brexit’) as our context. Drawing on interview data, we highlight how mothers embed prepping into their ongoing pursuit of intensive motherhood, bound in the highly gendered practice of feeding the family. While adhering to elements of intensive motherhood ideology (their actions are labour intensive/child centred), participants reveal a hidden element to their practice. We introduce the notion of ‘survivalist intensive motherhood’ to understand their actions. Survivalist intensive motherhood departs from earlier intensive motherhood studies due to the largely invisible nature of preparations and the trade-offs made to feed the family during resource scarcity.
Considering the Cache: Things in Christian Survivalism
The belief in the imminent return of Christ to earth has been a defining feature of American evangelicalism since the early twentieth century. Brought to prominence in America by the Fundamentalists of the 1910s and 20s, the doctrine of premillennialism, an interpretation of Biblical prophetic texts which claims that Christ's return will instigate the wars of Armageddon and end the world as we know it, gained a substantial following in the postwar period, reaching an apex of theological saturation in the 1970s and 80s. During this time, premillennialism acted as the driving force behind proselytization efforts and the development of an evangelical nationalist political movement that remains active today. 1 However, since the 1980s, premillennialist rhetoric has waned within the evangelical mainstream, as exhibited by recent sociological studies which report fewer evangelicals expecting an imminent apocalypse. 2 Of course, the mainstream is not entirely representative-there remain pockets of evangelicals who, in the past three decades, have built upon premillennialist theology rather than watering it down. The traditional premillennialist doctrine states that believing Christians will be taken to heaven before Christ returns, an event colloquially referred to as the rapture, therefore measures to ensure one's safety in the end-times are not required. The premillennialists who are the subject of this examination, Christian survivalists, have followed a different path-they argue that the rapture is extra-Biblical and rapture theology an invention of evangelical elites meant to take the edge off the end-times.