Primitivist Discourse Research Articles

Going Slumming in Mexico: Rereading Primitivism in Katherine Anne Porter’s Flowering Judas and Other Stories

Katherine Anne Porter’s short story collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories from 1935 features most of the author’s engagement with Mexico as a setting and its social realities after the revolution. While most scholars agree that Porter’s experiences during her stays in-Katherine Anne Porter’s short story collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories from 1935 features most of the author’s engagement with Mexico as a setting and its social realities after the revolution. While most scholars agree that Porter’s experiences during her stays in Mexico crucially shaped her artistic vision, there is less agreement on the specificities of her image of Mexico. While the short stories have been read as either a gradual disillusionment with Mexico or a generally colonialist take on the country and its political struggles, these readings, however, miss some of the most remarkable features of these stories. In contrast, this essay argues that taken together the Mexican stories can be understood as an early critical engagement with the political consequences of primitivism. By highlighting the problematic elements of primitivist discourse in both the work of expatriates in Mexico and what Porter perceives as the shifting away from socialist realism in muralism, these stories dramatize in how far primitivism not only skews the artists’ perception of the native population but, in fact, helps to cement exploitative social realities by romanticizing poverty, naïveté, and struggle. Mexico crucially shaped her artistic vision, there is less agreement on the specificities of her image of Mexico. While the short stories have been read as either a gradual- disillusionment with Mexico or a generally colonialist take on the country and its political struggles, these readings, however, miss some of the most remarkable features of these stories. In contrast, this essay argues that taken together the Mexican stories can be understood as an early critical engagement with the political consequences of primitivism. By highlighting the problematic elements of primitivist discourse in both the work of expatriates in Mexico and what Porter perceives as the shifting away from socialist realism in muralism, these stories dramatize in how far primitivism not only skews the artists’ perception of the native population but, in fact, helps to cement exploitative social realities by romanticizing poverty, naïveté, and struggle.

Recolonizing the Mind: Gottfried Benn's Primitivism

Literary primitivism in select poems and essays by Gottfried Benn reveals complex interrelations of primitivist discourse with modernism, colonialism, and fascism in Weimar Germany. Arguing that Benn explicitly enters the discourse of Weimar (post)colonialism in the mid-1920s with poems like “Erst wenn” and “Ostafrika,” this essay contextualizes Benn's colonial turn in the primitivist/modernist poetics of his earlier Rönne novellas and his brief turn to a fascist aesthetic in essays of the early 1930s. His primitivist poetic fantasy of the “Southern Word” becomes an imaginary palimpsest on which colonial and racial fantasies of self and other uneasily coincide as his literary imagination both merges with and exceeds the turbulent discursive currents of the Weimar period.

“We Can’t Go Back a Hundred Million Years”

Low-carbohydrate diets such as the Atkins Diet were especially popular in English-speaking developed countries in the 1990s and 2000s. The popular low-carbohydrate literature displays a strong discourse of “nutritional primitivism”: that is, pursuit of supposedly simpler, more natural and authentic ways of eating, as part of a quest for health. Nutritional primitivism includes evolutionary explanations for obesity and type 2 diabetes and arguments based on nutritional anthropology. This paper explores low-carbohydrate dieters’ responses to nutritional primitivism, based on an interview study late in the low-carbohydrate trend. Although some interviewees accepted nutritional primitivism unproblematically, most approached such ideas critically and skeptically—cause for cautious celebration given the problems of logic, evidence and (on occasion) racism in the primitivist discourse of the low-carbohydrate literature.

The Significance of Island of Demons and Kriss: The Bali Sub-genre of the South-Seas Films, Their Primitivist Discourse and Tropicalist Fantasy

This paper explores the articulation of Dutch East Indies colonial ideology through the two "Bali Films' strongly influenced by Walter Spies and wider colonial and primitivist discourses provided by contemporary reviews of the films. I discuss the reception of the films in the arena of visual-linguistic exchange, interpretation and contestation in the "contact zone. " In doing so, I examine the relationship between documentary, ethnography, and fictional narrative and analyze examples of ethnocentricity in terms of reference when viewing and evaluating visual material. This is done through an analysis of the discourse in reviews of the films and includes the subjects of landscape as an arena of visual linguistic contestation, the spurious interpretation of Otherness as "authenticity, " and the discourse of colonial possession and desire, which in turn, I equate with the development of sexual tourism in Bali. In analyzing the films themselves, I examine some early characteristics of the film documentary genre, relationships between colonial novels, tourist paintings, and "ethnographic" narrative film in the colonial context of the Dutch East Indies. This includes discussion of displacement of native exploitation onto the ethnic Chinese. More specifically, I scrutinize audience, identification, and interrelationships between colonial narrative forms. From my exploration of the film texts in relation to their reception in the form of the reviews, I highlight the concrete manifestation of primitivist views allowing the construction of Orientalist fantasy by filmmakers and viewers. This is based on misapprehended notions of authenticity amounting to the creation and perpetuation of a varied range of views about the films, all of which coalesce around a condescending apology of colonialism and over-simplified misunderstanding of Other cultures.

African dreams of cohesion: elite pacting and community development in transfrontier conservation areas in southern Africa

In this paper we argue that there is a paradox in the managerial attempt of the South African Peace Park Foundation, to foster cohesion within the development of Trans Frontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa by focusing on community participation and development. Cohesion is mainly found at the level of the elite – both European and African – promoting the idea of the TFCAs, which provides them with opportunities to develop ‘Super‐African’ identities, based on identifying with nature and the landscape rather than the nation‐state. The imagery about the African landscape on which this process is based has its roots in colonial and primitivist discourse on Africa and Africans which includes Africans in the concept of landscape, but only if apparently unadulterated by modernity. This ultimately presents a problem for the TFCA development and its aim to develop local communities: if local people would indeed economically develop, with all the material consequences, they would no longer belong in the inclusive European aesthetics of the African landscape.

Nationalism, primitivism and the golden age in Othon Friesz's Autumn Work (1908)*

Abstract. This paper focuses on a detailed analysis of the Fauve artist Othon Friesz's painting Autumn Work (1908) within the contextual juncture of nationalism and primitivism. The painting occupies a unique position within this framework as it elucidates a point a convergence between nationalist ideologies and the primitivist turn towards peasant cultures as a repository of the past. This interpretation also identifies how Friesz's fusion of the Virgilian golden age with the contemporary, rural myth disrupts the Self/Other framework of primitivism via the lens of national identity. Friesz's employment of classically influenced and avant‐grade aesthetics further underscores the ways in which the painting references not only his personal artistic negotiation between tradition and modernity, but also the significance of ancestral myths and temporal oppositions in both nationalist and primitivist discourse.

Invented Traditions: Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siècle

Around 1900, Poland saw the outgrowth of a nativist primitivism, one that consciously redefined the periphery as a site of cultural resistance. Primitivism, as Colin Rhodes points out, “does not designate an organized group of artists, or even an identifiable style arising at a particular historical moment, but rather brings together artists’ various reactions to ideas of the primitive.” Within the subject ethnicities of central Europe at the turn of the century, “ideas of the primitive” that were taking shape in the then stillemerging discipline of anthropology were influencing various constructions of national and regional identity. The nationalist imperative of the new discipline was emphasized by Jan Karlowicz, who, writing in 1906, argued that “a people certain of its own existence may calmly study its own folklore from a purely scientific point of view. Tribes deprived of their independence and living in endless fear of suppression and decay, however, must, while reflecting upon the nature and conditions of folkloric tradition, consider practical questions as part of such inquiries. For whenever reference is made to national peculiarities and attributes, there constantly arises the question: to be or not to be.” Karlowicz's remarks point toward a deeply subjective primitivist discourse whose articulations, in critical writing about the applied arts as well as literary representations of rural popular culture, form part of what Eric Hobsbawm terms the “invention of tradition.”

Modern Primitivism': Non-Mainstream Body Modification and Racialized Representation

This article focuses on the philosophy underpinning the non-mainstream body modification practices of `Modern Primitives'. This subculture seeks inspiration in the body modification techniques and bodily rituals of so-called `primitive societies'. Establishing their prioritization of body, sexuality, community and spirituality as analytical links, the author shows that these self-perceived radical opponents of Western modernity nonetheless remain captured in its foundational discursive assumptions. The author argues that the movement's enthusiastic turn towards `primitivism' represents a particular identity strategy within the late modern condition. Drawing on colonial discourse analysis, the author argues that the primitivist discourse originated as an ideology within colonialism and has informed the construction of the Western self-image. Modern Primitives' notion of `primitivism' is seen as a postcolonial legacy of this tradition of `othering', which inevitably reproduces stereotypes of racialized people.

Rejuvenation through Joy: Langston Hughes, Primitivism, and Jazz

The nature of Langston Hughes's engagement with the primitivism of the 1920s has been obscured from the beginning by a succession of myths. The oldest, propagated by hostile reviewers, has it that Hughes, led astray by his friend and editor Carl Van Vechten, was positively carried away with primitivist ardor to the great detriment of his art.1 The second myth, circulated by Hughes himself in order to counteract the first, tells us that Hughes was never seriously involved with primitivism, which he recognized all along for the fad that it was.2 The third myth, a later critical compromise, contends that after indulging for a few poems and a story or two, Hughes saw through the primitivist hoopla and simply repudiated all its tenets.3 The truth is more tangled than any of these stories acknowledges. Like T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and other white modernists, Hughes reacted as both artist and social critic to the primitivist ferment of the early twentieth century. Hughes's position was of course complicated by his racial identity, which made him an object and not merely an observer of primitivist representations. The complex and often conflicted results are manifest in much of his early work. In this essay I explore Hughes's relation to the primitive as it evolved, gradually and arduously, over a period of approximately twelve years from the early 1920s to the mid1930s. In extricating himself from the primitivist movement, Hughes struggled to disengage ideas long fused in primitivist discourse, attempting to rescue elements of primitivism that he

Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr. and the Critique of Anthropology

Thomas Biolsi and Larry J. Zimmerman (eds.), Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr. and the Critique of Anthropology, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997, x + 226 pages, $45.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).The legacy of Vine Deloria, Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins continues to plague anthropology in complex and amusing ways. A single chapter in his 1969 book, devoted to Anthropologists and Other Friends, presented a satirical, biting and hilarious send-up of the discipline from the perspective of a Native American scholar. Certainly there was some truth to Deloria's claim that anthropology was little more than a fancy form of colonialism, and anthropologists intellectual vultures. What puzzles, however, is not so much that Deloria was hardly the first to make these accusations, but that, for American anthropologists in particular, his words had such a dramatic impact. Following his publication, the American Anthropological Association convened what might be seen as crisis meetings designed to defend anthropology and respond to the critique. What followed was a major shift in the direction of the discipline, giving an impetus to the emerging field of applied anthropology, as practitioners attempted to reconfigure their work so that Native Americans benefitted.This volume consists of 10 chapters by various contributors, plus an introduction by the editors and, not surprisingly, a final comment from Deloria himself. The papers vary in style and tone, but all address in one way or another the question: what has the impact of Deloria's critique been on anthropology and Native American studies? Most papers have been written specifically for this volume, and the addition of one previously published paper (by Peter Whitely) strengthens an uneven text. The papers range from intellectual ruminations about Deloria and the state of the discipline, to case studies, personal reflections and largely irrelevant polemical statements. While the editors appear to establish a postmodern/postcolonial tone in their excellent introduction, there is no uniform theoretical orientation to the volume. This is unfortunate, as it seems that the postmodern critique appears to offer the best insight into the issues raised by Deloria.It is not possible here to discuss each chapter in the volume. From my view, the most interesting chapters include the introduction and several papers contained in the section titled Ethnography and Colonialism. Thomas Biolsi, for instance, employs the framework of primitivist discourse to critique the work of early-20th-century ethnographer Haviland Scudder Mekeel and its role in redefining Lakota culture and governance. …