BiblioVault - Books about Primitive

From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology

Bruce M. Knauft

University of Michigan Press, 1999

What have anthropologists taught us about Melanesia--one of anthropology's most important and intensively studied world regions? In this book, Professor Bruce Knauft draws together and critically reanalyzes what we know about major features of Melanesian cultural history, warfare and politics, gender, bodily practices, and spirituality as discerned from more than a century of academic study. From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology is arguably the most comprehensive single reassessment of Melanesia as an ethnographic world area to have been published in several decades. Written for students as well as professional scholars, this work further broadens our understanding by analyzing the history of Melanesian ethnography and relating this history to the larger relationship between Melanesia as a contemporary world area and anthropology as a field of contemporary human study. Bruce M. Knauft is Professor of Anthropology, Emory University, and the author of three previous books as well as some thirty journal articles and chapters. Knauft's interests span a wide range of issues in the anthropology of Melanesia and he is articulate with general issues of cultural theory and anthropological history.

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Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature

Gina M. Rossetti

University of Missouri Press, 2006

From Herman Melville’s Queequeg to Ken Kesey’s Chief Bromden, primitive characters have played key roles in literature and have generally emerged as enduring and sympathetic figures. In this book, Gina M. Rossetti focuses on works by Jack London, Frank Norris, Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen, arguing that primitive literary characters reveal complex and culturally based assumptions.

In the period of 1895 to 1929, Rossetti asserts, the primitive serves as a literary figure whose presence might link naturalism and modernism. Defining the primitive as “the dominant culture’s projection of its internal fear, anxieties, and attractions,” Rossetti explores how the working class and racial and ethnic minorities came to occupy the position of “primitives” and the degree to which more privileged individuals imagined themselves through the lens of this sometimes denigrated and sometimes romanticized Other. For the selected naturalist authors, the primitive is rendered in a Darwinian context, representing a figure whose presence will jeopardize American cultural identity by being evolutionarily inferior.

In modernist literature of the twentieth century, however, the primitive separates from Darwinism and becomes aestheticized. In much of the literature from this period, the primitive functions as a naive posture for the artist to assume in order to escape the complications of modern life.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of growing concern for the “vanishing Anglo Saxon,” and the primitive figure is often linked with theories of race. In this context, the racial primitive reflects the culture’s need for, and perpetuation of, a racial Other who gives body and shape to American identity. The final evocation of the primitive combines both the naturalists’ preoccupation with race-based notions of personhood and the modernists’ desire for a romantic escape.

Whether the primitive is invoked positively or negatively, Rossetti argues, it delineates the limits of American identity and, in the time period covered, often induces a double-edged response. The primitive’s marginality suggests the degree to which authors, privileged and otherwise, rely on its embedded presence in our national literature. Rossetti ultimately demonstrates that the primitive is not static but rather inconsistent and transformational, the source from which many naturalist and modernist texts project their concerns, fears, and contradictions.

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The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage

An Enlightenment Problematic

Tony C. Brown

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Tony C. Brown examines “the inescapable yet infinitely troubling figure of the not-quite-nothing” in Enlightenment attempts to think about the aesthetic and the savage. The various texts Brown considers—including the writings of Addison, Rousseau, Kant, and Defoe—turn to exotic figures in order to delimit the aesthetic, and to aesthetics in order to comprehend the savage.

In his intriguing exploration Brown discovers that the primitive introduces into the aesthetic and the savage an element that proves necessary yet difficult to conceive. At its most profound, Brown explains, this element engenders a loss of confidence in one’s ability to understand the human’s relation to itself and to the world. That loss of confidence—what Brown refers to as a breach in anthropological security—traces to an inability to maintain a sense of self in the face of the New World. Demonstrating the impact of the primitive on the aesthetic and the savage, he shows how the eighteenth-century writers he focuses on struggle to define the human’s place in the world. As Brown explains, these authors go back again and again to “exotic” examples from the New World—such as Indian burial mounds and Maori tattooing practice—making them so ubiquitous that they come to underwrite, even produce, philosophy and aesthetics.

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