Camping, survival, bushcraft or primitive skills?

This is a topic which has come up time and again on our Modern Bushcraft courses and as part of discussions with guests on our podcasts and followers over on our discord server. This time the source was Dave in Missouri who messaged us with this question at precisely the right time to get into a video.

Original Outdoors offers training in the UK and overseas, guiding expeditions, leading courses about wild food, navigation, bushcraft and survival. Alongside this we also train the military, police and other organisations in remote lone working, outdoor safety and man tracking through our sister brand Outdoor Professional. This experience and wider knowledge from constant learning have led to an in depth explanation of how we categorise these four overlapping subjects here at Original Outdoors.

Put very simply, camping is essentially sleeping outside in a planned or semi-planned situation. The shelter used could be a tent, hammock, swag, bivvy or other similar setup. The key point is that it is an intentional activity, this separates it clearly from survival which is not. Survival is something which you have to do when an unintended and unplanned event occurs and puts you in a position whereby you are using skills and equipment to get through a bad situation and simply stay alive. When you go camping, or if you end up in a survival situation you might use bushcraft skills.

The term ‘bushcraft’ has taken on multiple meanings, particularly in recent years where it’s definition has completely changed, but taken back to it’s roots it means the craft of living in the bush. In countries like the UK where we don’t have bush habitat we can apply it to our native habitats like woodlands and scrub. The word craft doesn’t here relate to building or handicrafts, it means skills and knowledge, essentially common sense (for living and thriving in wilderness like environments). Primitive skills are the skills of our ancestors, there isn’t an exact timeline break or cut-off, nor does it mean a way of life that was or is lesser than the average modern day way of life. On a broad level primitive skills can be defined as those that existed before a very complicated and hierarchical structured way of doing things.