A Requiem for the Primitive.” History of the Human Sciences

01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 1

A requiem for the ‘primitive’

FUYUKI KURASAWA

ABSTRACT This article argues that the implications of the recent eclipse of the construct of the ‘primitive’ for the practice of the human sciences have not been adequately pondered. It asks, therefore, why and how the myth of primitiveness has been sustained by the human sciences, and what purposes it has served for the modern West’s self-understanding. To attempt to answer such a query, the article pursues two principal lines of inquiry. In order to appreciate what is potentially being lost, the space that may be closing up as a result of the death of the ‘primitive’, the first part of the article strives to demonstrate the latter’s significance for the self-critique of modern ways of thinking and acting by historiographically reconstructing its changing roles within and representations by the human sciences. In the second section, it is contended that the eclipse of primitiveness has created a potentially problematic situation for the human sciences, since the cross-cultural mode of critique cultivated through this myth risks being neglected in a post-‘primitive’ age. All in all, then, the article claims that continued engagement with cultural alterity is essential for the human sciences after primitiveness, and that such an engagement can be sustained by an understanding of the different ways in which the ‘primitive’ has been defined and has functioned over the course of the modern era. Key words critique, cross-cultural thinking, modernity, ‘primitive’, representation 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 2

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The ‘primitive’ is dead and buried. If unfortunately, yet resiliently, surviving in the popular cultural imaginary (Di Leonardo, 1998; Ellingson, 2001; Torgovnick, 1990), it is a discursive construct that has had its day in the human sciences. Historiographies of numerous disciplines have eagerly competed with one another to announce the ‘primitive’ condition’s passing away, and then to write its obituary. Indeed, though surviving in small pockets of scholarship committed to the evolutionary paradigm, the idea of equating indigenous societies with a primordial human condition has been largely and convincingly laid to rest at the beginning of the 21st century. The argument that the ‘primitive’ does not correspond to any ‘actually existing’ cultures in the past or the present, that it is a signifier without a referent, hardly needs to be restated today. Nearly three decades ago, Geertz cogently made the point: ‘Every man has a right to create his own savage for his own purposes. Perhaps every man does. But to demonstrate that such a con- structed savage corresponds to Australian Aborigines, African Tribesmen, or Brazilian Indians is another matter altogether’ (Geertz, 1973: 347). A more interesting line of inquiry, I would argue, consists in turning the gaze on ourselves to study primitiveness as a shifting construct discursively produced by the Euro-American human sciences over the course of the modern era.1 Primitiveness is a myth, then, not solely in the realist sense of that which is opposed to the truthful or the observable, namely that which is relegated to the realms of fantasy, fiction or falsehood, but also in a more anthropological register: it represents a related set of beliefs and values generated to explain rhetorically what Euro-American societies have become in relation to their pasts and futures. Further, primitiveness represents one of the horizons of meaning through which Western modernity has constituted itself in contradistinction to its exotic alter egos (Bartra, 1994, 1997; Mason, 1990, 1998; Said, 1978, 1993; B. Smith, 1994).2 Nonetheless, it should not be assumed that discursive representations of the ‘primitive’ have inherently functioned in a negative manner, to assert the superiority of European civilization or justify colonial expansion and rule. In significant instances, Western thinkers employed the myth of primitiveness to radically put into question existing institutions, values and habits in their own societies. The tension between these two tendencies, namely the legitimation and self-critique of the modern project through the motif of primitiveness, is precisely what makes the latter a worthwhile topic of reflection. To most, our entry into a post-‘primitive’ age may appear like an innocu- ous event, barely noticeable in the millennial deluge of rupture and renewal. Nevertheless, I would argue that neither the causes of primitiveness’s eclipse over the last few decades nor its implications for the human sciences have been adequately pondered. Therefore, we must ask why and how has the myth of primitiveness been sustained by the human sciences, and what purposes has it served for the modern West’s self-understanding? To attempt 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 3

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to answer such a query, the article pursues two principal lines of inquiry. In order to appreciate what is potentially being lost, the space that may be closing up as a result of the death of the ‘primitive’, the first part of the article strives to demonstrate primitiveness’s significance for the self-critique of modern ways of thinking and acting by historiographically reconstructing its changing roles within and representations by the human sciences. Accord- ingly, the contemporary death of the ‘primitive’ can be contextualized as the final episode in a series of narratives structured by three preceding ruptures: the shock of the new (from the 16th to the late 18th centuries); the taming of the ‘primitive’ (from the late 18th to the late 19th centuries); and the return of wildness (from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries). In the second section, I contend that the eclipse of primitiveness has created a potentially problematic situation for the human sciences, since the cross-cultural mode of critique cultivated through this myth risks being neglected in a post- ‘primitive’ age. If one of the mirrors through which Western thinkers were able to critically interrogate their own societies has been shattered, it is worth pondering whether the capacity to foster an interculturally inflected critical hermeneutics of the present social order has been correspondingly weakened. All in all, then, the article claims that continued engagement with cultural otherness is essential for the human sciences after primitiveness, and that such an engagement can be sustained by an understanding of the different ways in which the ‘primitive’ has been defined and has functioned over the course of the modern era. Put succinctly, the baby of intercultural critique must not be thrown out with the bathwater of the ‘primitive’. The argument thus partly follows the lead of postcolonialism and critical anthropology in claiming that ‘primitive’ alterity has been pivotal in the process of Western modernity’s constitution, and that such a process was intimately tied to the history of colonialism. In other words, the production of primitiveness as an knowable object over which cognitive control could be established by the Euro-American human sciences was a form of symbolic domination through representational means, and, as such, legitimized (and in many cases paved the way for) colonialism’s political, economic, cultural and social technologies of ruling (Bhabha, 1994; Ellingson, 2001: 220–1; Fabian, 1983; Kuper, 1988; McGrane, 1989; Said, 1978, 1989, 1993; Todorov, 1984, 1993). Nevertheless, in accordance with a number of studies in the historiography of ideas, literature and the visual arts (Barkan and Bush, 1995; Bartra, 1994, 1997; G. Boas, 1948; Chinard, 1978[1911]; Goldwater, 1987[1938]; Lovejoy and Boas, 1935; Marouby, 1990; Meek, 1976; Rubin, 1984; Smith, 1989, 1992, 1994; Todorov, 1984, 1993; White, 1978a, 1978b; Whitney, 1934), the article also contends that the discursive constructs of the ‘primitive’ were not solely colonialism’s handmaidens; rather than being overdetermined by the western project of subjugation of colonized peoples and therefore always already cast in a position of inferiority vis-à-vis the colonizer, the ‘primitive’ 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 4

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was a complex and ambivalent figure that could serve to estrange, relativize and interrogate Western modernity from the outside. If this motif of critical self-reflection has itself been explored in anthropological circles (Clastres, 1977; Dumont, 1986, 1994; Marcus and Fischer, 1986), what has not been sufficiently recognized is the considerable extent to which it has operated at the core of the human sciences more generally over the course of the modern era. Another neglected aspect of this motif is the manner in which primitiveness’s ambivalence, its variable use to elevate and undermine Euro-American societies, has been fostered by a series of shifts in the discursive regimes of representation of the ‘primitive’. Hence, what is required is a historiography of primitiveness in various fields of knowledge, a tracing of its contingent and variable representations as well as of the roles which they have played in Western modernity’s self-conception. The arrival of a post-‘primitive’ era cannot serve as a pretext to agree with one of the characters in Voltaire’s (1956[1764]: 548) ‘Dialogues between A, B, and C’: ‘But after all, what do I care about the character of a Brazilian and the feelings of a Topinambu? I’m neither one nor the other; I want to be happy at home, in my own way. We must investigate the condition we’re in, and not the one we cannot be in.’ Investigating conditions beyond our own has frequently been, in fact, a way to avoid complacency and arrogance about the here and now. The prism of non-Western and non-modern socio-historical constellations has vitally informed critical interpretations of ‘the condition we were in’: ancient Greece and Rome were the grounds of Renaissance neo- classicism; the European Middle Ages inspired Romanticism (or, to be more specific, Romantic pastoralism); the ‘Orient’, Africa and the Pacific gave birth to various modes of exoticism (of which Orientalism and primitivism are the most widely recognized). Further, primitiveness’s radical alterity, sheer otherness and non-identity stimulated a critical hermeneutics of the present: stretching out toward the ‘primitive’ provoked an intercultural turn back onto the modern, a questioning of that which appears normal or natural through the encounter with cultural difference.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PRIMITIVENESS

To contextualize the extent to which the current relegation of primitiveness to the dustbin of history is signiﬁcant, its presence in Western modernity’s midst should be recovered. This can be accomplished not to revive the ‘primitive’, but rather the better to appreciate how it has been intertwined with the self-constitution of the modern condition. Indeed, the death of primitiveness marks a rupture in the discursive ﬁeld moulding the modern imaginary’s self-understanding, one that, as stated above, is akin to three other previous breaks: the shock of the new (from the 16th to the late 18th 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 5

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centuries); the taming of the ‘primitive’ (from the late 18th to the late 19th centuries); and the return of wildness (from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries). When studying these shifting systems of interpretation, one cannot but agree with the conclusions of authors already mentioned above: the modern West has never been a sui generis or given entity, for it has inevitably drawn upon the contrast with the ‘primitive’ to try to establish itself as a distinctive and stable socio-historical constellation.3

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

The so-called ‘discovery of the New World’ which eventually fuelled the wave of European expansionism in the Western hemisphere also spawned a lengthy period of intense wonderment and self-questioning in the Old World. More than two and a half centuries after Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic, its impact was still resonating in the pages of Voltaire’s momen- tous essay on the mores and spirit of nations: ‘Without doubt, this is the greatest event of the world, of which one half had always been unknown to the other. Everything that has hitherto appeared great seems to disappear in the face of this kind of new creation’ (Voltaire, 1963b[1756]: 330; see also Mason, 1990; Todorov, 1984).4 Going back to the Renaissance’s culmination, it was Montaigne who first seized how the shock of encounter with a new and previously unknown culture completely altered the existing intellectual landscape. Far from trivializing primitiveness as an amusing oddity to be incorporated into Europe’s expanding cabinet of curiosities, Montaigne pioneered the use of a cross-cultural perspective to problematize the false universalism and moral absolutism of European civilization. Questioning the widespread horror provoked by the practice of cannibalism, one of the most celebrated passages from his Essays states: ‘I think there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in’ (Montaigne, 1948[1578–80]: 152; see also Toulmin, 1990: 28). Beyond this argument for cultural perspectivism, Montaigne enlisted the figure of the American ‘savage’ to contend that Europe had been corrupted by its veneration of the artificial and its consequent estrangement from the wisdom of nature. The repercussions of the ‘discovery of the New World’ can also be found at the core of 17th-century debates within political philosophy, notably those of the natural law tradition that invented the mechanism of the social contract as the founding myth of the state; the passage from a natural to a social condition was imagined to have been accomplished through an originary compact between free, pre-societal individuals. For social contractarians, 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 6

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then, the legitimacy of social institutions (notably that of private property) was premised upon the transcendence of and contrast with primitiveness, for ‘savages’ had lived without religion, government or laws as the French expression states, ‘sans foi, roi, ni loi.’ For instance, to support their compet- ing versions of the character of the relationship between the state and civil society, Hobbes and Locke needed to paint rival scenarios of the state of nature. For Hobbes, it was a condition of perpetual and violent anarchy, where each individual was at war with all others: ‘no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes, 1962[1651]: 143). By contrast, Locke introduced a distinction between the state of nature and the Hobbesian state of war: the former, which corresponded to the existence of American ‘savages’, was governed by the natural rule of reason, whereas the latter was a subsequent perversion of the inalien- able rights of each individual (Locke, 1924[1690]: 119–26). Consequently, Hobbes considered that an omnipotent state was required to guard against a return of primitiveness, whereas Locke wanted to preserve our natural rights within a market society. Although social contract theory heavily drew upon constructs of primitiveness, at no other time did the shock of the confrontation with it echo louder than during the Enlightenment. In France, and later in Germany as well, the ‘primitive’ condition became a reference-point for the key disputes of the age (about the place of religion, the contribution of the arts and sciences, the role of reason and instinct, the course of history, etc.). The ﬁnest minds of that unsurpassed intellectual epoch could not but engage with primitiveness as a fundamental motif through which to pass judgement upon civilization. Among the philosophes, Montesquieu was perhaps the earliest to seize the impact of cross-cultural interrogation prompted by the era of European exploration and colonialism: ‘The compass opened, if I may so express myself, the universe. Asia and Africa were found, of which only some borders were known; and America, of which we knew nothing’ (Montesquieu, 1952[1748]: 170). The Spirit of Laws, his masterpiece of comparative socio-political analysis, proposed a taxonomy of forms of government assessed in relation to each other, but also in contradistinction to the state of nature. Whether it is republicanism, monarchy or despotism, socio-political arrangements had to preserve the laws of nature while moving beyond both savagery and barbarism.5 Among the towering ﬁgures of the Enlightenment, Rousseau offered the most controversial argument about the uses of primitiveness as a means to interrogate European civilization. Though commonly interpreted as a primitivist not least because of his fellow philosophes’ misinterpretations of his intentions (Condorcet, 1955[1795]: 54; Gay, 1969: 94–6; Lovejoy, 1948[1923]; Voltaire, 1995[1755]: 376–7), he never actually created an image of the noble 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 7

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savage, nor did he advocate a return to the state of nature; at most, he favoured the simple rusticity of the French and Swiss countryside. The reflections on humankind’s pre-societal origins found in his first two Discourses, those on the arts and sciences (1973a[1750]) and the origin of inequality (1973b[1750]), aimed to create a figure of critique of the ancien régime’s perversion of our own nature: ‘For it is by no means a light undertaking to distinguish properly between what is original and what is artificial in the actual nature of man, or to form a true idea of a state which no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist; and of which it is, nevertheless, necessary to have true ideas, in order to form a proper judgment of our present state’ (Rousseau, 1973b[1750]: 44).6 Staging a confrontation between a budding modernity and the state of nature, Rousseau’s writings decentred and estranged the social order of his time by questioning its doxa, its unexamined assumptions, opinions and norms.7 Diderot, who was with d’Alembert the chief architect of the Encyclopédie, enlisted the ‘savages’ of Tahiti in his Supplément to Bougainville’s Voyage (1972[1796]) to question the assumed universalism and superiority of European moral standards. Even Voltaire, that relentless slayer of obscuran- tisms of all sorts, felt it was necessary to tackle primitiveness in order to lend credence to his own socio-political opinions. With his usual wit and irony, Voltaire intermittently employed images of the noble and ignoble savage to suit his argument. At one point striving to undermine the former construct, he claimed that it violated the natural order: ‘But what does the brutish and isolated savage (if there are such animals in the world, which I strongly doubt) do from morning to night but pervert the law of nature by being useless to himself and all men?’ (Voltaire, 1956[1764]: 547). Such an assault was required, Voltaire felt, to help establish a still fragile faith in human reason as well as in a vision of progress over time; his tale L’Ingénu (1954[1767]) and his magisterial ‘Essay on the Mores and the Spirit of Nations’ (1963a[1756]) stand as two examples of such uses.

THE TAMING OF THE ‘PRIMITIVE’

The late 18th century marked the beginning of a process of normalization of the ﬁgure of the ‘primitive’. Whereas the initial encounter with it had relativized European civilization, its radical alterity and newness were gradually domesticated as it became integrated into emerging systems of thought. Because the Enlightenment ideal of universal human progress and liberty through the benevolent spread of reason became more solidly established, primitiveness was viewed as a previously absent piece of an enlarged ‘great map of mankind’ rather than a threat to the legitimacy of society. Furthermore, the ‘primitive’ was increasingly cast as a reminder of an 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 8

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immature (and thereby inferior) phase of human history, a phase long since surpassed by Europe. Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1955[1795]: 169) was the bluntest statement of this shift, for it portrayed ‘savages’ as ‘vegetating in the infant condition of early times’, a dark morass where enlightenment does not yet, and perhaps never would, shine. In Germany, the Aufklärer were themselves having to seriously consider primitiveness in their socio-historical reflections. While Herder was busy defending the Naturvölker’s right to retain their cultural particularism in his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1966[1784]), Kant (1991a[1784]: 41–4; 1991b[1785]: 219–20; 1991c[1786]: 226–7) drew inspira- tion from across the Rhine in his defence of a progressivist and universal philosophy of history, coupled to a belief in the moral and cognitive growth of human capacities. Far from being a motif of critique of the modern West, what Kant (1991a[1784]: 47) termed the ‘lawless state of savagery’ served to legitimate the benefits of civilization and the forward movement of time; only modernity could realize the promises of perfectibility and autonomy. As for Hegel, Kant’s great heir and critic, the place of primitiveness in his philosophical framework was modest. Nonetheless, his comments on the subject epitomized the taming of the ‘primitive’ in two respects. First, Hegel (1952: 179) severely attacked the tendency to idealize the state of nature, a fable that he deemed to be ‘the twilight of theorizing reflection’. Second, because it was stagnant, and therefore deeply negating of the Weltgeist’s teleological dialectic of self-overcoming toward universal reason and freedom, this same state of nature ‘lies beyond the pale of history’ (Hegel, 1952: 181). In other words, Hegel did not even conceive of primitiveness as the childhood of humanity, a role he reserved for the ‘Orient’, but expelled it outside of history altogether; ‘savages’ living in a stateless condition of quasi-bestiality could easily be discarded in the forward unfolding of the world-spirit. They had become ‘people without history’ (Wolf, 1982). Besides Hegel, the taming of primitiveness was furthered by two related developments during the course of the 19th century: by the consolidation of biological and social evolutionary theory, and by the birth of sociology and anthropology as distinct disciplines. Derived from Enlightenment develop- mentalism, social evolutionism grounded progress in the inherent improve- ment of the human species over time; all cultures could be lined up along a single chronological axis, according to a gradation of relative levels of backwardness and advancement. Yet unlike 18th-century progressivist theories, social evolutionism claimed that a ‘higher’ stage directly evolved out of a ‘lower’ one; Montesquieu’s tripartite model of savagery, barbarism and civilization could thus be rearticulated within an evolutionary logic. For its part, biological evolutionism attributed the principle of human progress to physiological and natural laws rather than metaphysical, economic, or 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 9

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socio-cultural phenomena per se – or to be more precise, metaphysical, economic and socio-cultural development was attributed to biology and nature; behind the self-unfolding of consciousness or the drive toward civilization could be found natural selection and the struggle for existence (Stocking, 1968, 1987). Simultaneously, anthropological and sociological fields of knowledge were being constituted as separate domains according to a hierarchical divide: while the former’s object of study gradually became modern, industrial society in the West, the latter was devoting itself to the study of the ‘primitive’ (traditional or indigenous peoples of colonized territories). Coupled to racialist frameworks attributing an inferior status to non-Western peoples, special- ization within the human sciences meant that research on primitiveness was predominantly confined to a single discipline. Spencer, the founder of sociology in the English-speaking world, preceded Darwin himself in applying Lamarckian evolutionary principles to the analysis of society. His conceptions of survival of the fittest and his organicist models led to the attribution of specific genetic-cum-racial characteristics to the ‘primitive’: homogeneity, simplicity, stagnation, weakness and, consequently, mental and physical inferiority (Spencer, 1969, 1971, 1972). Barely worth studying in sociological circles, the primitive condition became the degree zero of human evolution. The founding texts of Anglo-American social anthropology, such as Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1974a[1871], 1974b[1871]), Morgan’s Ancient Society (1964[1877]) and Frazer’s Golden Bough (1922[1890]), converged in similar assessment of ‘primitive’ peoples.8 The lowest rung on the scale of civilization, the latter constituted modern society’s ancestors, frail and stagnant infants doomed to extinction by the merciless unfolding of the laws of nature. ‘It is a harsher, and at times even painful, office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction. Yet this work, if less genial, is not less urgently needful for the good of mankind’ (Tylor, 1974b[1871]: 410). Under the aegis of evolutionism, primitiveness came to stand not only for non-modernity (that which is other to the modern condition), but also for pre-modernity (that which chronologically and biologically precedes it). Consequently, it was of interest as a way to provide answers about humankind’s origins and the European road to modernization, rather than as a potential mode of critical self-estrangement of the modern condition. The ‘primitive’ was viewed as a slowly dying museum of our social origins.

THE RETURN OF WILDNESS

Despite the dominance of evolutionary theory in the latter half of the 19th century, another transformation of the discourse about primitiveness began 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 10

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to appear on the horizon. Increasingly, the trope of wildness, of rupture with the constraints of a civilized life draining the vitality of humankind, re- surfaced. Primitiveness was reconstructed as a radical outside of bourgeois culture, through which the latter’s flaws could be exposed for all to view. Nietzsche and Freud, two of the greatest critics of modern society, typified this emerging stance. Nietzsche’s use of the myth of the ‘primitive’ stands out for two specific reasons. Most directly, it reinvigorated the critique of Western modernity by revealing the artificial character and devastating consequences of the domestication of the human animal, who only followed the ‘herd-instinct’ of the masses. Second, Nietzsche reversed the con- ventional strategy employed to interrogate modern society; instead of praising the noble savage (benevolence, innocence, purity, peacefulness, etc.), he championed the traits of his ignoble counterpart (cruelty, instinctiveness, rapaciousness, violence, etc.). As an embodiment of the Dionysian spirit, the ‘primitive’ blond beast was to be cherished rather than condemned. Its primal will-to-life and its individualistic morality sought to overcome existing norms and limits, thereby acting as a remedy against a civilizing process which Nietzsche believed to be responsible for humanity’s decay. His Genealogy of Morals puts the case thus: ‘it is the meaning of all culture to breed a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal, from the predatory animal “man” ’ (Nietzsche, 1996[1887]: 27; see also Nietzsche, 1954[1883–92]; 1967[1872]). Set in opposition to the self-satisfied, prudent, comfortable and thoroughly rational ‘last man’, Nietzsche’s Übermensch represented a revival of this predatory animal, a return to our bestial origins in order to revive modernity’s putrefying corpse. The fin-de-siècle also witnessed the coming into being of Freudian psycho- analysis, another current of thought which drew upon the image of ‘primitive’ wildness to critically interpret civilization and grasp the modern self. Freud’s approach internalized primitiveness by situating it within the psyche’s unconscious; it was less a matter of geographical and civilizational distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’ than of psychic intimacy between the ego and the id (which contained our primal instincts and drives): ‘So that, instead of the relatively comforting thought that the Wild Man may exist out there and can be contained by some kind of physical action, it is now thought . . . that the Wild Man is lurking within every man, is clamoring for release within us all, and will be denied only at the cost of life itself’ (White, 1978a: 153–4). Civilization and its Discontents (1994[1930]) portrayed the beast within as partially (though never perfectly) domesticated, for it represented a constant threat to the brittle modern social order that could erupt at any moment in the form of anti-social or psycho-pathological behaviour. Yet Freud’s argument was not merely an apology for civilization, since it pointed out that the civilizing process demanded of us a certain degree of sacrifice of our original freedom. In its existing incarnations, modern society was requiring 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 11

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a difficult (and in some cases excessive) process of repression, rechannelling or denied gratification of our ‘primitive’ drives – a process that had produced unhappiness for many individuals. While primitiveness’s wildness was coming to the fore, the turn of the century witnessed sustained challenges to evolutionary theory. In anthropological circles, Boas was among its most persistent critics, claiming that the existence of a single, universal line of human development and of a genetic- ally based hierarchy of races was untenable. ‘It is clear that if we admit that there may be different ultimate and co-existing types of civilization, the hypothesis of one single general line of development cannot be maintained’ (F. Boas, 1940: 282). Instead, Boas defended a type of cultural pluralism according to which a multiplicity of developmental paths had been created in the world. Because they stood for different modes of organizing social life, ‘primitive’ societies were not reduced to the childhood of humankind or to a condition of backwardness. Mead and Malinowski, among others, extended this line of reasoning into the first half of the 20th century, so that primitiveness came to stand yet again as a credible figure of socio-historical alterity and of human cultural diversity from which modernity could be interrogated. At about the same time in France, the Durkheimian school of sociology and anthropology was revisiting the lineage of Montaigne, Montesquieu and Rousseau to apply primitiveness to a comparative interpretation of western modernity (Durkheim, 1960[1953]; Lévi-Strauss, 1971[1945]). This position was most striking in Mauss’s The Gift (1988[1923–4]), an analysis of ‘primitive’ practices of exchange that contained a powerful indictment of the modern market and the monadic individualism it engendered. Through an exploration of the gift economy, structured by communal moral codes of obligation and reciprocity, Mauss denaturalized the calculative and acquisi- tive character of capitalism, as well as the subordination of other spheres of social life to its logic. For their part, Durkheim’s writings (the more comparative of which were often co-authored with Mauss) contained numerous insights into the renewed uses of primitiveness. In the first instance, he rejected the speculative idea of a state of nature as well and gradually distanced himself from evolutionism. ‘Primitive’ cultures were therefore perceived as simpler forms of human organization, yet also as chronologically contemporaneous and of equal standing (Durkheim and Mauss, 1968a[1903], 1968b[1913]; Lukes, 1985: 519). In his later work, Durkheim applied cross-cultural comparison to question the health of many of modern society’s institutional arrangements. The ‘collective effervescence’ and sense of solidarity generated in ‘primitive’ sacred ceremonies contrasted vividly with the situation in Western industrialized contexts, where the decline of religion and the consequent rise of excessive individualism risked cultivating a moral torpor and sense of anomie which no social institution, not even the division of labour, could adequately address (Durkheim, 1995[1912]).9 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 12

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A fascinatingly paradoxical figure, Lévi-Strauss extended the French revitalization of the primitive. Retrospectively, he stands out as the last great critic of modernity to have heavily drawn upon the construct of primitiveness, yet his writings also prepared the ground for its demise. On the one hand, Lévi-Strauss was committed to the idea of the ‘primitive’ because it enabled him to enter into an alternative cultural universe from which to mythologize some of the modern condition’s pillars, that is, to deprive them of necessary or natural standing. Hence, the cognitive operations of the ‘savage mind’ were analysed to highlight the rule of abstract rationalism in the modern West, and therefore to cross-culturally interrogate the cult of the Cartesian cogito; this is the basis of Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) famed contrasting metaphors of ‘primitive’, ‘bricolage’ and modern ‘engineering’. In a more radical fashion, Lévi-Strauss advocated a philosophical ecology inspired by the outlook of ‘primitive’ peoples who, he believed, discovered an equilib- rium between nature and culture by never falling into the hubris of anthro- pocentrism. Such a world-view was favourably juxtaposed to that of modern society, whose capitalist industrialization had strayed away from the wisdom of the ages by striving to completely subjugate (and consequently, destroy) the natural environment (Lévi-Strauss, 1978, 1985). Despite his strategic use of primitiveness, Lévi-Strauss was paving the way for its dissolution in the last decades of the 20th century. Indeed, his structural anthropology undercut the assumption of historical and cultural incommensurability between the modern and the ‘primitive’, as well as that of the latter’s inferiority in relation to the former; all societies were placed along a horizontal and contemporaneous plane of juxtaposition, through which their varying configurations of natural and cultural influences could be examined. He argued that, regardless of their different orientations to the world, the ‘savage’ and domesticated minds manifested similar degrees of cognitive complexity. In this manner, Lévi-Strauss completed the revaluing of primitiveness begun at the turn of the 20th century, for in his hands it became an alternative way of putting the world into form; neither ancestor nor poor cousin, yet magisterially other.

THE ECLIPSE OF THE ‘PRIMITIVE’

Today, rather than being viewed as backward, inferior, or even completely different, societies hitherto considered ‘primitive’ are for the most part taken to represent, like their western counterparts, wholly valid manifestations of humankind’s diversity; indigenous cultures are full participants in the great human mosaic’s present and future, not bystanders or backward remnants of bygone ages. What has led to such a sea-change, whereby the myth of primitiveness becomes unsustainable? One must certainly point to the 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 13

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wave of decolonization following the end of the Second World War, which profoundly transformed the socio-political environment within which Western forms of knowledge could be produced and operate. The end of empire marked not only the gradual attainment of political self- determination on the part of former colonies, but also the assertion of their right to be treated on a par with the erstwhile colonizers. Moreover, indigenous peoples around the world have drawn attention to and struggled to stem the tide of internal colonialism in ‘New World’ societies. It thus became increasingly clear that a process of intellectual decolonization had to follow the tide of history, so as to discard prejudicial conceptions of non-Western cultures. Accordingly, the vast evolutionary edifice and the hierarchical, racialist taxonomies with which it was frequently paired have come under increasing assault. Anthropology, the field that explicitly constituted the ‘primitive’ as its object of analysis, is also the one which has most consistently contributed to its recent downfall. The internal problematization of anthropological representations of non-Western peoples is certainly not new, yet it has become more generalized as a result of a number of developments. Prompted in part by the postcolonial critique of anthropologists’ blindness about, denial of or complicity with the project of Euro-American colonialism (Said, 1989), a self-critical stream from within the discipline has rejected primitiveness in toto. The latter has been historicized as an illusory creation inextricably tainted by colonial, evolutionary and racist assumptions. The attribution of primitiveness to certain cultures acted to establish a temporal distance vis-à-vis modernity; ‘primitive’ societies were denied contempo- raneity, and thus expelled outside of or to the beginning of history (Fabian, 1983). Moreover, it has been pointed out that the attribution of a ‘primitive’ status to certain cultures has frequently acted as a stigmatizing form of naturalism which, by positioning human societies within the realm of nature, undervalued or disparaged their civilizational achievements and socio- cultural institutions (Ellingson, 2001; Kuper, 1988). Critical anthropology has produced at least two other currents challeng- ing the salience of primitiveness. Initiated by the highly influential Writing Culture project (Clifford and Marcus, 1986), the discipline has pursued a reflexive turn or, to be more exact, a textual and meta-anthropological turn which has scrutinized the practice of ethnographical fieldwork during its ‘classical’ period (c.1870–1950). As such, the mechanisms through which were generated constructs of the ‘primitive’ have been laid bare: the act of writing, the inscription of meaning by way of particular narrative devices and conventions, the establishment of authorial voice and authority, as well as the roles of observer and informant. The abandonment of primitiveness has been accompanied by a redirection of the anthropological gaze toward modern Western cultures, and thus a transformation of the discipline’s traditional 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 14

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object of study. A host of anthropologies of modernity have been developed to cross-culturally estrange familiar and proximate normative systems, ensembles of practices and institutional complexes. Western modernity itself has been anthropologized.10 Primitiveness’s downfall cannot but be embraced as a necessary step in the process of interrogation of the assumptions of Western-based systems of knowledge and the decentring of Euro-American civilization from its privi- leged position within cross-cultural research. At the same time, the dance on the primitive’s grave has tended to obscure the fact that its demise leaves us in an aporetic predicament: contemporary developments in the human sciences may have dispensed with primitiveness, yet they have largely been unable to reproduce the effect of far-reaching estrangement, denormalization and denaturalization of our familiar socio-cultural horizons which it provoked. As Bartra (1994: 208) has pointed out, ‘[t]he European wild man reminds us that we might have been something else’. By encouraging the putting into question of key modern socio-cultural practices and systems of thought, primitiveness has revealed the processes of their self-instituting. Cross-culturally, modern society could not be apprehended as given, in- herited or natural. Instead, it had to be understood as a complex, ambiguous and sometimes contradictory institutional configuration stemming from a set of particular and, indeed, peculiar orientations to the world. So far, however, alternative, post-‘primitive’ sources of this radical imaginary have not been readily forthcoming. Although the articulation of cultural pluralism and relativism has been tremendously useful in recognizing the worth of all peoples, it runs the risk of trivializing cross-cultural differences by portraying them as a series of variants of an overarching human community whose parts are assumed to be familiar and entirely commensu- rable with one another (Mason, 1998: 1).11 For its part, the recent turn toward anthropologies of modernity exemplified by the multi-volume Late Editions project (Marcus, 1993) is certainly commendable, yet it tends to substitute the loss of the traditional object of disciplinary knowledge (namely, the ‘primitive’) for an undistinguishably vague practice of cultural studies bereft of cross-cultural inflections. In addition, what has been witnessed in the past few decades is a noticeable shift of focus from intersocietal to intrasocietal forms of difference, to the extent that the ‘primitive’ has been overtaken by domestic motifs of alterity (woman, Jew, person of colour, mad-person, prisoner, homosexual, stranger, etc.).12 All of them represent difference within though never fully part of the socio-historical and spatial bounds of the Western world, rather than otherness outside of it. Another response to the death of primitiveness has been retrenchment to a safe parochialism. Supported by Lyotard’s (1984, 1985) claims about incredulity toward metanarratives as well as Rorty’s (1992) world-weary, ‘frank ethnocentrism’, this position claims to acknowledge upfront the intrinsic incommensurability of cultures (taken as self-enclosed 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 15

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entities). Since it is assumed that efforts to understand distant or unfamiliar societies are bound to fail due to untranslatability or, barring that, ﬂawed universalization, the task of the interpreter should be to deal with what is close at hand and already familiar. Local, partial and contingent knowledges should accordingly be given the pride of place. Despite being fruitful in many respects, both the search for internal Others and the privileging of localism promote a withdrawal of the western human sciences to their own cultural horizons; the prospects of a renewed, buoyant cross-cultural critique recede into the distance.

CONCLUSION: BEYOND PRIMITIVENESS?

We have seen that four shifts have punctuated primitiveness’s role in the self-critique and self-understanding of Western modernity. From the initial sense of cross-cultural questioning provoked by its ‘discovery’ and triumph, to its subsequent domestication by progressivism and evolutionism, and then to its return as a key reference-point in the 20th century, the ‘primitive’ remained a prism through which the modern experience in the Euro- American world could be assessed: it has acted as the unknown ‘New World’; as the pre-social state of nature; as humankind’s infancy or a backward stage in the chain of evolution; as a simpler blueprint for modern society; as the subversive wildness buried beneath civilization; and, finally, as an alternative social configuration. In the wake of the developments noted in the first section of the article, it is this latest incarnation that has led to the myth’s debunking. Today, primitiveness is widely considered a metonymic trope stripped of referential content because invalid or unconvincing. The ‘primitive’ condition has come to stand as a empty signifier revealing little or nothing about non-Western cultures, though a great deal about the socio- cultural assumptions of the forms of knowledge which have produced it over the course of the past few centuries. What has been exposed to scrutiny is the strong tendency toward exoticism, the invention of mythical constructs of primitiveness structured by the dialectic of idealization or denigration of cultural otherness, a dialectic best exemplified in the images of the noble and ignoble savage. While the eclipse of primitiveness is to be welcomed, I have contended that the thrust of cross-cultural inquiry which it engendered needs be preserved in the post-‘primitive’ age; to jettison engagement with other socio-historical constellations in toto would considerably impoverish modes of critique of the modern West. Further, it can be argued that neither the intercultural contextualization of Western modernity nor the intracultural questioning of its existing social order can be effective without a willingness to encounter non-Western horizons. And deprived of such contextualization and questioning, the human sciences are in danger of parochially closing in upon 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 16

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themselves, of ceasing to imagine and investigate other modes of social organizations, practices and subjectivities. What, then, would be some of the contours of non-exoticizing yet cross- culturally inspired forms of human scientific knowledge? For the purposes of this article, only a few succinct remarks can be advanced. A reorientation of systems of thought along these lines must, of course, dispense with the practice of instrumentalizing cultural alterity; it is evident that non-Western peoples can no longer serve as empty canvases onto which to project the fantasies and nightmares of the modern West. Moreover, it would strive to avoid the reification or essentializing of difference, as well as, relatedly, reductionist dichotomies presuming the absolute and pure otherness of non-western cultures imagined as self-enclosed and homogenous entities (Thomas, 1991; Fuchs, 1993). Nevertheless, the human sciences cannot shy away from the difficult terrain of earnest engagement with different cultures in order to put into question normalized forms of thinking and acting in their own socio-historical settings. Accordingly, an intercultural hermeneutics of this type would strive to enact principles of openness, mediation and reflex- ivity (Kurasawa, 2000), so as to launch a substantive cross-cultural dialogue which would itself dramatically counter any narrowing of the possibilities for individual and collective existence; it would seek to rekindle reflection upon and assessment of multiple ways of life. In the last decade or so, global anthropologies, sociologies and histories of alternative modernities have effectively enacted many of the ideas described here by highlighting historically formed intersections and flows between cultures, as well as the internal pluralism of cultures themselves.13 This has been accomplished in order to comparatively distil lines of difference and similarity, but also to muddy and complicate what are commonly assumed to be rigid cultural divides between the Western and non-Western worlds. By decentring and interrogating naturalized or taken-for-granted sets of beliefs and practices in proximate life-worlds through careful engagement with other realities, interculturally invested work in the human sciences enables us to gain a different and, I would contend, an ultimately richer understanding of our present state of affairs. Because they interpret Western modernity from a partial outside, resulting perspectives foreground its socio-historical pecu- liarities so as to normatively evaluate its accomplishments and flaws while attempting to side-step both wholesale denunciation and triumphalism. Primitiveness may be dead, yet, impregnated with the lessons of the past, may its cross-cultural successors thrive.

NOTES

Research for this article was made possible by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship (756-2000-0316). I would like 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 17

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to thank James Good and the anonymous referees from History of the Human Sciences for their comments. Peter Beilharz, Chris Eipper, Trevor Hogan and Joel Kahn, as well as the participants in the Anthropology Seminar series at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, also commented on earlier versions of this paper. 1 This focus on Western modernity is not intended to suggest that primitiveness is a feature unique to this socio-historical constellation. First, the creation of the ‘primitive’ precedes the modern era, since it was found in Greek antiquity and the European Middle Ages. Second, it is not an exclusively Western tendency, for it exists in many (though certainly not all) non-Western cultures. Etymologically, the term ‘primitive’ initially designated whatever was considered original, basic or primal in a given socio-historical formation. Dating back to ancient Greece, such traits came to be attributed to particular peoples who, for better or worse, were believed to negate the dominant standards of civilization. 2 Modernity is understood here as a socio-historical constellation whose intellectual and cultural roots can be traced back to the span between the 16th-century European Renaissance and the 18th-century Enlightenment, yet whose socio- economic and political institutionalization only emerged with the dual French and Industrial Revolutions in the late 18th century. As this article will attempt to demonstrate, the advent and consolidation of the modern project was not purely endogenous to Europe; it was made possible, in fact, through its juxtaposition to the ‘primitive’ (as well as, of course, ancient and medieval epochs of European history). However, this is not to say that primitiveness originated in the modern era for, as Bartra (1994, 1997), Lovejoy and Boas (1935) and Boas (1948) have demonstrated, it was derived from ancient and medieval conceptions of the savage, the barbarian and the wild man. At this point, a distinction should be made between primitivism and primitiveness. Following Lovejoy and Boas (1935), primitivism can be divided into either chronological or cultural streams; both idealize the primitive condition through the trope of the noble savage, although the ﬁrst fondly looks back to humanity’s remote past while the second celebrates the simplicity of an existing uncivilized state. Like Orientalism, primitivism is a subgenre of exoticism, a set of practices and ways of thinking that privilege the strange over the familiar – notably non-western cultures positioned as historically or geographically distant from the modern West (Fabian, 1983; Mason, 1998; Said, 1978; Smith, 1992: 10; Smith, 1994: 104–5). By contrast, primitiveness is a broader category that incorporates both primitivism and anti-primitivism, for it includes viewpoints that may elevate or denigrate supposedly ‘primitive’ cultures. In other words, primitiveness is shaped by the dialectical interplay between the tropes of the noble and the ignoble savage. 3 The approach adopted here, that of the history of ideas, is not intended to suggest that the three major discursive shifts operated independently of the play of economic and political forces unleashed by colonialism. If no exact correspon- dence between the different phases of European imperialism and representations of primitiveness exists, the former can be said to set the bounds within which the latter could be produced. For instance, it can be argued that the last discursive formation (termed here the return of wildness) corresponded to the height of colonialism, the carving out of much of the globe and establishment of formal political rule over it (Hobsbawm, 1987); thus, once it had been politically 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 18

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domesticated, cultural otherness could be imagined as untamed. However, the demonstration of such a thesis would best be accomplished by examining specific historical and geographical instances of colonial rule from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, something that goes well beyond the scope of this article. 4 The translation is my own. 5 For Montesquieu, savagery consisted of isolated communities practising hunting and gathering, whereas the later stage of barbarism was defined by the development of animal-herding and agriculture (Montesquieu, 1952[1748]: 127–8). This distinction influenced Adam Smith’s (and, more generally, the Scottish Enlighten- ment’s) theory of the four stages of development: hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce (A. Smith, 1995[1762]; see Meek, 1976). 6 The emphasis is mine. 7 In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1973b[1755]), Rousseau turned Hobbes’s and Locke’s legitimating naturalization of private property on its head. The state of nature is transformed into a critical trope with which to denounce the socio-economic consequences stemming from the diffusion of ‘possessive individualism’ (Macpherson, 1962), for Rousseau contends that private property is nothing more than a socio-historical convention. The Social Contract (1973c[1762]) evoked a natural human condition to encourage the creation of a mode of social organization surpassing the ones which predominated during the ancien régime. 8 As Stocking (1968, 1987) has demonstrated, the relationship between Victorian anthropology and evolution is complex, since monogenist and polygenist hypo- theses competed with one another as explanations of the origins of humankind. 9 Although he eventually broke with Durkheim and Mauss, Lévy-Bruhl was another member of the French school of ethnology for whom primitiveness acted as a trope of critique of modernity. Specifically, he argued for a fundamental distinction between the excessive rationalism of modern thought and the pre- logical yet richly mystical character of the ‘primitive’ mind. See, inter alia, How Natives Think (1966[1910]), the earliest of six books he dedicated to the topic. 10 In France, the most prominent representatives of this inverted anthropology are Dumont (1977, 1986, 1994), Bourdieu (1979, 1988, 1993) and Augé (1994, 1995, 1998), whereas Rabinow (1996, 1999), Di Leonardo (1998) and the Late Editions series edited by Marcus for the University of Chicago Press are instances of it in the American context. See Fuchs (1993). 11 Much the same movement has been noted in the visual arts, as Goldwater explains: ‘Since 1938 [the year of publication of the first edition of Goldwater’s study] the impact of the primitive arts has receded; . . . because those arts, now accepted in all their variety, have been absorbed into the history of man’s plastic creation and are as familiar as Romanesque sculpture or Chinese bronzes. They no longer appear as “primitive” as they did before 1940, when they could still be thought of as both distant and contemporary – a setting that enhanced their mystery. At the same time, all those qualities which here have been summed up in the term “primitivism” are not as new or as surprising as they once were. They too, like primitive art itself, have become more familiar parts of our aesthetic environment’ (Goldwater, 1987[1938]: xvi). 12 This is not to say that this concern with domestic figures of alterity is unique to 01 Kurasawa (JG/d) 9/7/02 8:38 am Page 19

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the current age, since it is reminiscent of previous epochs’ concern with internal Others (e.g. pagans in the Middle Ages, rustic peasants in the 18th century, the urban poor in the 19th century). What is different about the present, however, is the lack of coexistence of internal and external Others – a coexistence that had characterized the modern era up until fairly recently. 13 For recent instances of cross-culturally informed yet non-exoticizing writings, see, inter alia, Appadurai, 1996; Arnason, 1997; Asad, 1993; Augé, 1998[1994]; Bourdieu, 1988, 1990; Dallmayr, 1996; Dumont, 1986, 1994; Friedman, 1994; Gilroy, 1993; Kahn, 1995, 2001; Rabinow, 1996, 1999; Thomas, 1991.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

FUYUKI KURASAWA is Assistant Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of articles in journals such as Inter- national Sociology, Theory, Culture & Society and Thesis Eleven, as well as of The Ethnological Imagination: Western Social Theory and the Cross- Cultural Critique of Modernity (forthcoming from the University of Min- nesota Press).

Address: Department of Sociology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada. Tel: 416 736-5015. Fax: 416 736-5730. [email: [email protected]]