1From a German perspective, it is striking that the notion of primitivism is hardly used in French-language research. With the exception of a few recent works on primitivism in literature (Denogent 2022; Le Quellec Cottier et Rodriguez 2023a), the term only appears in art history (Dagen 1998, 2019, 2020; Brun 2019). It seems that Claude Lévi-Strauss’s dismissal of the category of the “primitive” in anthropology has tainted its related terms (“primitivist” is pejorative, and is often used with inverted commas) and has invalidated “primitivism” as a general concept, as well as its relevance for studying modernity. As a result, primitivism is addressed only indirectly in case studies (see, for example, Fabre 2006, 2009; Kalinowski and Stravinaki 2011), but not treated as a global ideological concept. By contrast, foundational texts on the topic have been published in Germany (Kramer 1977; Schultz 1995), where primitivism has been the subject of many theoretical and historical analyses since the 2000s (see the separate section in the Bibliography).
2In the context of a journal issue dedicated to connecting Germanophone and Francophone research, it seems essential to highlight the work of a German researcher whose studies on primitivism are authoritative today. Erhard Schüttpelz, born in 1961, published his Habilitation thesis in 2005 under the programmatic title of Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven: Weltliteratur und Ethnologie (1870 – 1960) [The Modern in the Mirror of the Primitive: World Literature and Anthropology (1870 – 1960)]. The two dates in the subtitle mark the period between the publication of Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture, which initiated the academic institutionalization of anthropology, and the decolonisation of Africa.
- 1 “‘Primitive’ being essentially a temporal concept, it is a category, not an object of Western thoug (...)
3Schüttpelz’s research on primitivism began with his rediscovery of the German anthropologist Fritz Kramer during a year spent at Columbia University and through the works of Michael Taussig. He has been particularly inspired by Kramer’s Der rote Fes: Über Besessenheit und Kunst in Afrika (1987) [English translation: The Red Fez: On Art and Possession in Africa], which interprets African art and possession cults as ways of representing alterity. Kramer’s project, which influenced a whole generation of German anthropologists, was a form of “reversible” or “inverted” anthropology. Since his first book on primitivism as an “imaginary ethnography” (Kramer 1977), he took up the ideas of Julius Lips’s The Savage Hits Back (1937) to highlight the otherness of the European (Kramer 1989), while also drawing on the literary tradition of the Persian Letters and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the “archaic illusion”. In his 2005 book, Schüttpelz reconnects with this self-critical current that emerged in anthropology in the 1940s and ethnologizes the category of the primitive, or “symmetrizes” it (in Bruno Latour’s sense), thus transforming the perspective on colonialism and the “separations” it has entrenched. In this new approach, the “primitive” is understood not as an object (which could easily be reconstructed or deconstructed from a contemporary viewpoint), but, as Johannes Fabian had already pointed out,1 a category of Western thought that generates “allochrony”, i.e., places others in an imaginary past.
- 2 With the exception of Frédéric Keck’s book on Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (Keck 2008).
4In contrast to the Francophone approach to primitivism, which is based on the “construction of the Other from within Western ethnocentrism,”2 Schüttpelz focuses on the category of the “primitive” as a key part of modernity’s self-depictions, which he interprets from the perspective of anthropological texts read as “Persian Letters”. Therefore, at the core of his work is the demand to reconsider modernity in a symmetrical fashion. In this spirit, he complements Latour’s dictum “We have never been modern” with the condition “precisely because they have never been primitive”. Since Western modernity invented and defined itself ex negativo by distinguishing itself from the “primitive” other, it has always been haunted by “primitive philosophers” (Paul Radin). These philosophers have sometimes managed to undermine the epistemological compartmentalization of modernity by introducing alternative orders of knowledge. This way, Europeans have been observed by others and become the object of an inverted ethnography, as Kramer described in Der rote Fes regarding African possession cults.
5Schüttpelz’s Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven (2005) comprises a wide range of case studies, including Paul Radin’s Winnebago ethnography, Lévi-Strauss’s “writing lesson”, Jean Rouch’s Mad Masters, Aby Warburg’s lecture on the “snake ritual” (1923), and Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (1925). In the context of this issue’s focus on literary appropriation, the first of these cases, “‘The bushmen’s letters are in their bodies’ (1873)” (chapter 2), is the most insightful. In this chapter, Schüttpelz examines the paratexts of Specimens of Bushman Folklore (1911) by Lucy Lloyd and William Bleek, highlighting the voice of the informant, which has often left no trace in similar anthologies. Indeed, he reinstates his authorial privileges: by the end of his analysis of the preface, afterword, frontispiece, and the titles, //Kabbo, the man who taught him the San language, no longer appears as a mere informant but as an author in his own right, on equal footing with the linguist. In his reading of the paratexts, Schüttpelz reveals the way //Kabbo thought about the relationship between writing and orality, which unsettles their conventional distinction in Europe. In addition, he notes a situation of reciprocity between two linguistic experts whose unequal relationship conceals a pragmatic economy of exchange of gifts (in Mauss’s sense).
6In the second part of the book, devoted to the question of “world literature”, Schüttpelz analyses the crisis of the notion of literature when confronted with colonial-origin oral literatures imported into Europe. He argues that these oral literatures, firstly, provoked a new understanding of the written word as being derived from speech and ritual institutions; secondly, they drew attention to the social function of literature “prior to any aesthetics of autonomy”, and therefore gestured towards “a functionalist conception of literature”; lastly, they turned the aesthetics and poetics of “primitives” into a universal reference point (Schüttpelz 2005: 366–379).
7At the beginning of the following chapter, taken from a book on literary primitivism (Gess 2013) and translated into English, Schüttpelz places the study of primitivism in a long-term perspective, tracing its origins back to 1930. His core argument is that artistic and literary primitivism must be understood, similarly to the origins of anthropology at the end of the nineteenth century, as a “boomerang effect” (Schüttpelz 2018). Having arrogantly excluded all potential “others” from Western modernity, Europeans found themselves excluded from “the more universal […] oecumene of humanity”. In this sense, modern primitivism was a way of confronting the global minority called “the West” with the more universal oecumene. This confrontation had consequences for literature as well, for instance, when primitivist authors favored an aesthetics of heteronomy, considering it to be more original than the established concept of autonomy. In the conclusion to his chapter, Schüttpelz emphasizes the importance of folklore, which, in the nineteenth century, took over one of the tasks previously carried out by antiquarianism, namely to document allochronic cultural artefacts. Thus, the approaches to literary and philological provenance research outlined in this issue aim to continue the project initiated by Schüttpelz.
- 3 Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Hopkins P (...)
- 4 George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Hopkins Press, 1948).
- 5 Cf. the programmatic list of volumes for the Contributions to the History of Primitivism in Lovejoy (...)
- 6 Ibid., 1ff.
- 7 W. F. Albright, “Primitivism in Ancient Western Asia,” and Dumont, P.-E., “Primitivism in Indian Li (...)
8Considering research into literary primitivism, three research traditions can be distinguished. The first of these is rarely discussed in Germany, yet continues to have a seminal role in English-language publications, for instance on eighteenth-century primitivism. The study of “primitivism” was the oldest and most thorough of all projects in the North American history of ideas, and was developed by Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas in the 1930s to encompass the entire history of the West.3 This project was to extend from antiquity into the eighteenth century, and in part even into the twentieth century, specifically through the characterization of a Romantic epistemology, a “Romantic theory of knowledge.” This ambitious project remained fragmentary in many respects, with publications consisting mainly of anthological sketches of antiquity and the Middle Ages,4 as well as essays and editions on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.5 It is not easy to weigh the merits and weaknesses of the project against one another because they remain intertwined. Boas and Lovejoy distinguish between “chronological primitivism” and “cultural primitivism,” i.e., as to whether the highest cultural values are to be found at the beginning of history (chronological primitivism) or among the simpler cultures of our time (cultural primitivism).6 With this distinction, we can see that the two have often coincided in modernity, and that this coincidence does not have to be the norm historically or may even be an exception. As I will try to demonstrate, this coincidence may even define the specific modernity of Primitivism, and thus, the very idea of being modern. The distinction between these two primitivisms also meant that the Lovejoy/Boas project was initially conceived in comparative terms and included forays into Indian and Mesopotamian primitivisms.7
- 8 Ibid, 11–12; cf. the lexicographical analysis 447ff. Of course, etymological (and, at least in some (...)
- 9 Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: The Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard U (...)
9A further merit of Lovejoy and Boas is their detailed exposition and problematization of the occidental concept of “nature” in its Greek, Latin, and modern variants. The concept of nature is outlined in correlation with chronological and/or cultural primitivism and is exposed in all its deceptive peculiarities—“one of the strangest, most patent, and most persistent factors in Western thought,”8 as Lovejoy and Boas call it, no doubt with good reason. Lovejoy’s most successful study, his historical overview of the concept of the “great chain of being,”9 began as an sideline of this examination of the duplicitous capacities of the occidental concept of nature.
- 10 Cf. Lovejoy and Boas: Primitivism and Related Ideas, “Preface.”
- 11 Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1871).
10On reexamination, however, the limitations of this history-of-ideas approach cannot be overlooked. The essence of Lovejoy and Boas’s project was their own belief in progress, what they call the “idea of progress.” It was, to be sure, an unabashedly evolutionary conception of progress that they unquestioningly adopted as the guiding principle of their observations. In consequence, “primitivism” (in all its variants) was seen by the authors as being necessarily an antipode of all conceptions of progress.10 This presupposition led to skewed conclusions already about the eighteenth century and its “romanticism”, for example in the treatment of Rousseau. Contrasting primitivism with theories of progress would be all the more misleading if applied to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Literary primitivism would be solely that which opposes the narratives of progress, such as the “noble savage” of the eighteenth century and the “Golden Age” since antiquity. But in modernity, this division becomes misleading, both in terms of theory and in terms of literature. To name just one example, if not a paradigm: Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture11 is undoubtedly the work of a believer in the idea of progress, including and especially with regard to progress in religion and culture as a whole. On the other hand, modern primitivism is hardly conceivable without the generalization of Tylor’s concept of “survivals,” and with it came many of the affirmative references to the “primitive” origins of modern institutions. And many a theorist would on the other hand, in one form or another, concede the superiority of these origins, at least in certain respects: being whole, being less alienated, etc. If one attempts to categorically separate notions of progress and primitivisms in modernity between 1860 and 1960, neither can be adequately explained. Describing modern ideas of primitivism requires a sense of dialectics that has remained absent from the classifications so characteristic of the history of ideas.
- 12 The first monograph on the art-historical concept was published by Robert John Goldwater, Primitivi (...)
- 13 For example, in the account by Gill Perry, “Primitivism and the ‘Modern,’” in Primitivism, Cubism, (...)
11The second research tradition emerged only in part from scholarly categorizations, while the historically more significant part emerged from the local self-understandings of non-scholarly practices. The art-historical concept of “primitivism” emerged in the twentieth century as part of debates about artistic and curatorial practices and justifications termed “primitivist,” and only subsequently sparked controversies in art criticism about the visual arts. The great advantage of this concept is undoubtedly the result of how it developed—from art and art criticism to art history—in other words, how it emerged within artistic practices and arguments as they were originally discussed among artists and art critics before being generalized by art historians beginning in the 1930s.12 The advantage of this “indigenous” emergence of the concept of artistic “primitivism” is that subsequent research is thus directed toward reconstructing its artistic and curatorial practices, thereby dispensing with generalizations such as those in the history of ideas, but also in discourse history. In this respect, the art-historical concept continues to be influential and remains most incisive when this development is taken into account. And it has a literary side effect, because painters, sculptors, and critics can be authors too, and write about their relationship to the primitive.13
12For this reason, it may seem fruitful at first to apply this art-historical concept to the history of literature. However, it turns out that—unlike the affirmative references of visual artists—it was unusual in modernist literature to describe literary practices as “primitivist.” In order for the art-historical concept of “primitivism” to be applied to literary history, it must be reinvented or else generalized in a different way; for the literary history of “primitivism” cannot presuppose a similarly striking series of literary practices, literary criticism controversies, and aesthetic generalizations.
- 14 Michael Bell, Primitivism (London: Methuen, 1972).
- 15 Joachim Schultz, Wild, irre und rein. Wörterbuch zum Primitivismus der literarischen Avantgarden in (...)
13Innovative applications of the art-historical term have already taken place multiple times in literary history, as in the 1972 monograph by the D. H. Lawrence expert Michael Bell,14 in which he derives literary primitivism (with Lovejoy and Boas) from Romanticism, but also from turn-of-the-century anthropology and psychology; and in Germany, in an annotated anthology by Joachim Schultz.15 Both monographs grapple with the difficulty that literary “primitivism” was and is not an established term and must first be developed through textual references. The more textual references are connected, however, the more diffuse their historical distribution becomes, largely as a result of jumping back and forth chronologically in order to make generalizations about the evidence, which is seldom conducive to historical verification and which Schultz quite openly treats as the cataloging of clichés.
- 16 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
14Can this weakness be avoided? The difficulty of applying the art-historical concept to literary history is not only a matter of collating textual references. The greatest temptation in adopting the art-historical model would seem to be that of limiting oneself to the task of imagology. Whatever form the “primitive” takes, it then becomes a composite “image” made from single images, which must then be recorded as faithfully as possible from one textual reference to the next. The reception of Edward Said’s analysis of the discourse of “Orientalism”16 has additionally contributed to this imagological bias. To some extent, this bias can be attributed directly to Said, because his book was the work of a literary scholar who set out to establish generalizations about discursive patterns and who saw the power within that discourse as clearly distributed. an inevitable linkage between power and discourse. But Said’s book—although it would have to be rewritten today in order to describe the intercontinental exchange of Orientalizing practices in modernity—was by no means an imagological book, even if literary scholars often read it that way. It is a book about “othering” the Other, which may happen by using reductive images, but also by essentializing inabilities for modern institution-building.
15Yet, it is still possible to apply the art-historical examination of “primitivism” to literary history without reducing it to imagology, namely by raising the question of the role of “primitive art” as a model for modern artists. By analogy with artistic primitivism, one can then ask: In which cases did art—in our case, the literature of the so-called “primitives”—serve as a model and template for one’s own aesthetic projects and individual literary works? When we ask this question, we come to the realization that modern writers looked far less frequently to “primitive literature” as a model for poetry and literature than to “primitive thought.” It is this fact that makes it necessary to turn to the third research tradition on “primitivism,” in which the role of “primitive thought” as a model was taken up very early for a variety of reasons.
16The most important impetus for the discussion of literary primitivism in recent decades has come less from literary studies than from the historical investigation of anthropological scholarship, especially ethnology, known internationally as (social or cultural) “anthropology.” The conceptualization and critique of “primitivism” is so intimately linked to the establishment of international anthropology that it would be arbitrary to determine when “primitivism” went from being a constitutive pillar in the history of anthropology, to being critically dismantled, and finally becoming a legitimate historical object of research. By the late 1940s at the latest, the recognition of primitivism in anthropology gave rise to a research tradition of its own, which in its popularized forms also resulted from anthropologists’ own (self-)critical reflections. In this respect, the development can be seen as a parallel to artistic primitivism: the critical and historical concept first emerged within discussions by the practitioners in the field, was only later generalized by art historians and historians of science, and was eventually adopted as a common notion in the study of culture.
- 17 Franz Steiner, Taboo (London: Cohen & West, 1956).
- 18 Fritz Kramer, Verkehrte Welten. Zur imaginären Ethnographie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main (...)
- 19 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia Universi (...)
- 20 Fabian, Time and the Other, 18.
17The long history of the anthropological historicization of primitivism thus goes hand in hand with each turn of the critique and self-critique of anthropology, but also with that of all the other anthropological disciplines following the Second World War. It also took place in areas where it did not appear that the category of “primitive” was being discussed or where a certain terminological confusion had prevailed, such as in the “writing culture” debate of the 1980s. Some of the clearest elaborations appeared in the period shortly after the Second World War, most notably in the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss and in Franz Steiner’s first historiographical account of ethnological terminology, which is still valid today.17 In German ethnology, two books deserve special mention for their contribution to the debate on primitivism and for their continuing relevance: Fritz Kramer’s book on the “imaginary ethnography” of the nineteenth century,18 which skillfully combines literary history and the history of science (and should be translated); and Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other from 1983,19 whose polemics seem less topical today, as they focus on a debating against structuralism and modern structural-functionalism, but which does deal with one category crucial to the study of modern “primitive,” namely the peculiar “allochronism” or “othertimeliness” of the primitive, which ought remain at the center of anthropological discussion. In his account, Johannes Fabian concisely captures why any imagological account, but also any intellectual history of primitivism, is bound to fail: whatever form the “primitive” takes, it is not an object but a category. “Primitive, being essentially a temporal concept, is a category, not an object of Western thought.”20
18One consequence of this shift in the concept—from an imaginary object of perception to a category—resulting from the work of Johannes Fabian, but also that of Fritz Kramer and his school of thought, is that it sidelines convenient forms of ideological critique. If “primitive,” in whatever form it takes, is at its core a temporal category, invoking and condensing the category of time itself—the time of human history, but also the time of the world, and the time of the present, past, and future of individuals and collectives, the inner time horizon and objective calendar and clock time—then its modern allochronism is indeed comparable to other allochronisms, by other people and even in relationships of reciprocity. The primitivism of the modern “primitive” is de-privileged, for even the so-called “primitives” of modernity had multiple ways of locating their historical counterparts, the colonizers, missionaries, soldiers, to some “primeval time” or “prehistoric time” or “other time,” for example as the descendants of a long past epoch of humanity or of vanished ages, and thereby qualifying them as “primitives.”
- 21 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Archaic Illusion,” in The Elementary Structures of Kinship.
19An advantage of the anthropological historicization of the “primitive”—and of modern primitivism—lies in the possibility of a symmetrical approach that takes into account all the asymmetries at work in modern primitivism: both in temporal categorizations and in the unequal distribution of power and knowledge. Shortly after the Second World War, Claude Lévi-Strauss laid out the framework for the possibility of establishing the symmetry of the “primitive” in an elegantly derived epistemological excursus on “the archaic illusion.”21 Lévi-Strauss characterizes the modern equivalence and illustrative interchangeability of the behaviors of children, the mentally ill, and “primitives” as an anthropological illusion, but one that may arise with some degree of inevitability in any culture. He wrote that foreign customs and practices may be perceived as childish and children as “savages” because of the way that they experiment with a repertoire of behaviors that the adult world has unlearned; foreign customs and practices may be perceived as “crazy” to the extent that they remind us of those individual syntheses that lead to our exclusion (and institutionalization) as “insane.” But not just modern people and ourselves; indeed, all societies and cultures can harbor similar sentiments and create corresponding categorizations about foreign cultures as well as their own children and the mentally ill—even if each society’s educational institutions, social hierarchies, and treatment of mental illness take on a different form, which may in turn appear to others as “sick,” “crazy,” “childish,” “wild,” or “primitive.”
- 22 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935).
20There is a long tradition in the history of anthropology, especially in the history of American cultural anthropology, of establishing such symmetries and thereby anthropologizing “primitivism,” as well as past forms of scientific primitivism. The intellectual groundwork for this approach goes back to the sustained critique of anthropological categorizations of primitives, which the Boasian school had been working to dismantle since 1900. A didactic summary from the Boasian school can be found, especially, in the introductory part of Ruth Benedict’s bestseller Patterns of Culture,22 which seems to have been the starting point for Lévi-Strauss’s elegant crystallizations. Foreign social institutions, psychopathological affects, and psychosocial defects lend themselves to comparison and association across cultures. Across cultures, and sometimes within a culture, what may be a pathological display of emotion in one place may be institutionalized in another and stigmatized as an individual defect in yet another. The potential of this nevertheless deceptive comparison between defect, affect, and institution serves as a response to the illusory equation of children, the mentally ill, and primitives, while at the same time rendering it recognizable through Lévi-Strauss’s generalization as an “archaic illusion,” the illusion of a common archaic heritage.
- 23 Julius Lips, The Savage Hits Back (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937).
21Despite their early popularization by Ruth Benedict and their further sharpening by Claude Lévi-Strauss, these insights have not yet become common knowledge in the study of culture, and it is still unclear what implications they will have for literary studies. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate to me to conclude that the most convincing grounds for the elucidation and reconstruction of modern primitivism are to be found in the already accomplished generalization and symmetrization within cultural anthropology—that is, in the famously notorious “relativism” of anthropology. The advantage of the symmetrical approach is not only that it can be applied to texts, but also to the entire colonial world and all its various antagonists and shifts, modes of conduct, and justifications: we are (and have been) the primitives of the primitives; the colonizers and the whites have been seen by the so-called primitives in all possible places in the world as “savages,”23 as “primitives,” as lunatics, as children, and as sharing the realm of more than one of these attributions at once.
22After this short review of the three most important research traditions, the question arises as to how they can be used to characterize modern literary primitivism. After what I have outlined, it should come as no surprise when I advocate for giving the anthropological research tradition a central place in literary studies, especially with regard to the points I have already mentioned: in the deepening of a recognition of the role of allochronism in modern primitivism; and in the deprivileging of the category of the “primitive,” including the remarkable conflation of postulating a common phenomenology for the modes of thought between primitives, children, and the mentally ill, being both remarkably modern and tied to modern institutions between 1890 and 1950, and not modern at all according to the comparative exercise by Claude Lévi-Strauss, being no privilege of the West, or of Western rationality.
23But this deprivileging should not prevent research from being more precise in dating modern “primitivism” and in understanding its uniqueness. If one studies the category of the “primitive” in modernity, one will not find it developed in anthropological discussions prior to the 1860s. Instead, its establishment in the sciences and arts dates back to the last third of the nineteenth century, that is, to the realpolitik period of European imperialist escalation, on the one hand, and the scientific and popular breakthrough of evolutionist temporal structures, on the other. That said, it is also true that the anthropological category of the “primitive” has been repeatedly criticized and bracketed off by anthropologists since the early twentieth century, but was not finally abandoned until the long process of decolonization following the Second World War. This is why the term—as only very few terms have—remained linked with the escalation and collapse of a global political order, on the one hand, and to certain scientific and popular currents, on the other. It is, as Johannes Fabian noted, a truly cosmological “category.”
- 24 Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge Univers (...)
24The delineation of a modern “primitivism” followed this irreducible correspondence—not through a simple equation of knowledge and power, but on account of the sometimes paradoxical consequences that fully fledged imperialism and evolutionism would impose on their inhabitants. At the height of European, colonial, and—in the USA and other countries—“postcolonial” world conquest, there could be little doubt as to which populations held the monopoly on power, scientific knowledge, and technological development. For the inhabitants of the world at that time, this was experienced as historical exclusivity—of a temporal order, a distribution of power, and claims to knowledge. The allochronic category of the “primitive” emerged from the culmination of this exclusivity in evolutionism—or, to put it simply, from its self-referential history of progress. And even in anthropological writings as early as the 1860s and 1870s (for example, in the founding documents of Lubbock, Morgan, Maine, and Tylor), one finds that the intellectual and practical consequences of claiming world-historical exclusivity create a boomerang effect that makes the prospects of primitivism inescapable. In analogy to Maurice Bloch’s “re-bounding violence,”24 one could speak of a “re-bounding exclusivity,” for nowhere was violence far removed from this experience of exclusivity.
25Modern primitivism may be defined as a boomerang effect of the category of the primitive. For this reason, it may not be reduced to an aesthetic current, but instead should be characterized in terms of the same epistemological and philosophical perspectives from which the scientific and aesthetic principles emerged. In short, those who exclude all others will find themselves excluded from the world. Those who exclude all of Earth’s other inhabitants from their own minoritarian history of progress, or, as it happened, from “history itself”—like the Victorians, who seek to justify and are compelled to assert their claim to a monopoly of reason, power, and knowledge—will feel excluded as a result of such a project, just as the concrete historical realization of the temporal order will exclude them from an even more comprehensive history of humanity and from the majoritarian ecumene of humankind. This majority thus appears—due to the interconnection of prehistory and the outside world—as a “temporal majority,” situated within or across the “abyss of time,” temporally and semantically prior to the escalation of modernity, and as the majority of the human population as compared to the minority of modern colonizers, missionaries, and Europeans. The more comprehensive ecumene—that is to say, the “world of the primitives” with its diffuse entanglement between the colonial exterior and prehistory—also embodies the more universal genealogy of the world, and even the more universal genealogy of one’s own minoritarian linear and collateral lineage, that is to say, the “origin” and the “essence” (and through its “essence,” the “nature” or, in another philosophical vein, the conditions of its “existence”) of all social institutions and cultural inventions, and especially the unity or wholeness which has been sorted out in the modern divisions of labor.
26Those who exclude all others from their own exclusivity will feel excluded from a more universal ecumene. This is the intellectual but also the affective consequence of installing an allochronism underpinned by violence, i.e. the time barrier constitution of the term “primitive,” that inevitably leads to the possibilities of an aesthetic and epistemological “primitivism,” that is, not only to the possibility of experiencing the boomerang effect of one’s own exclusivity, as if haunted by an unknown strangeness, but also of giving it a shape and making it speak. It is through this boomerang effect that anthropology proper emerged and consolidated itself as an academic discipline, with its first chairs and publication bodies for “social anthropology,” “cultural anthropology,” and “ethnology.” It is, and in a certain sense still remains—though today on uneasy terms and in two minds about nearly everything—its task to study the more universal and allochronic ecumene of humanity. You will find true humanity where you feel excluded from what you have to accept as being human beyond the assumptions of your humanism. This also seems to me to be the true historical reason why (what in Germany is called) “ethnology” came to take over the category of “anthropology” in the Anglo-Saxon countries, i.e., in the countries at the centers of world domination, without this ever having been planned or officially desired, and which has not been relinquished to this day: in the USA and Great Britain, as in Germany, ethnology has always been only one of the anthropological disciplines, but its claim to a comprehensive and at the same time allochronic ecumene of cultures or societies has allowed it to advance to the center of anthropological research in the USA and in Great Britain (in contrast to Germany), which has led to abbreviating “social anthropology” and “cultural anthropology” to “anthropology” proper.
27However, the emergence of ethnology and its renaming as “anthropology” is undoubtedly not the only boomerang effect of the evolutionary time barrier. To grasp the full effect of “re-bounding exclusivity,” it remains helpful to formulate it as a question: When have the members of modernity felt excluded from an allochronic but potentially universal lineage—namely, from the world of the “primitive”? And when, in turn, did the affirmation of that lineage turn into an creative challenge for them—artistically, scientifically, or philosophically? It was the boomerang effect of exclusivity that first gave “primitive art” its role as a model and “primitive thought” its role as a supplement of philosophical thought, a development that was more than improbable within the traditional fusion of power/knowledge, and that has indeed remained unexplained in previous art historical interpretations.
28An example will help here to demonstrate that this question is really about a form of self-understanding that is as conceptual as it is affective. In 1927, the art historian Aby Warburg, justifying his academic career since the 1890s, wrote:
- 25 Aby Warburg, “Vom Arsenal zum Laboratorium,” in Works (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 683–94, 687.
"Primarily, I still lacked some sort of gauge to evaluate how the dynamic elements reflected in the artwork functioned as essential and internal human processes. Humanity’s entanglement with art necessitated first a firm connection at some point in reality—in its rooted, unitary holistic existence of religious-cultic, artistic-pragmatic teleology."
"Then in 1895–96 on the New Mexican mesas where I observed the mask-dances of the Hopi Indians, I experienced artwork as an instrument of magical-primitive culture. I was able to study the Hopis’ peculiar civilization for many months. I thus became convinced that primitive man, no matter where on earth, produces a fundamental equivalent for that which in so-called high culture is understood as an aesthetic event. Imbued with this awareness about the intellectual and spiritual constitution of pre-historic man, I reentered the precinct of Quattrocento Florentine culture in order to examine the soul’s stratification in Renaissance man on a very different and much broader basis."25
29This characterization of his own project can undoubtedly be described as “primitivist,” not only in accordance with all three research traditions, but also in terms of the boomerang effect from “re-bounding exclusivity” described above. Particular attention should be paid to:
-
the time barrier of an immovable allochronism: contemporary populations teach us “about the intellectual and spiritual constitution of pre-historic man”;
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the draft of a more comprehensive ecumene of humanity, which therefore promises a more universal insight than that of our own particular tradition: “that primitive man, no matter where on earth, produces a fundamental equivalent for that which in so-called high culture is understood as an aesthetic event”;
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the role of “primitive culture” as a model, or a “gauge”;
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but also the heteronomy of that which in modern culture becomes operative as apparent autonomy (here: of art), a derivation whose “origin” is a supplemental shift in the initial object of observation: “for that which in so-called high culture is understood as an aesthetic event,” but allows the work of art to emerge first “as an instrument of magical-primitive culture,” and thus more fully than in our division of labor, giving rise to an aesthetics at odds with itself, an aesthetics-against-aesthetics, or an aesthetics looking for the right kind of heteronomy within and beyond art.
30This example can be generalized through its definition. Only those artists, writers, composers, researchers, and philosophers should be characterized as modern primitivists who can be shown to have devised or carried out a project in which the claim to exclusivity of their own genealogy was countered or supplemented by recourse to a more universal—and indeed an allochronic, i.e., “primitive”—ecumene of humanity. Applying this criterion seems to me to be the most fruitful, for with its help one comes upon the usual suspects, but also upon some still unreconstructed philosophical, scientific, and artistic projects of modernity, and in German intellectual history and literature at least upon the following canonized greats: Carl Einstein (art critic and theorist), Robert Musil (novelist), Gottfried Benn (poet), Sigmund Freud (psychotherapist), C. G. Jung (ditto), Leo Frobenius (cultural anthropologist) and his disciples, Pater Schmidt (Catholic missionary and anthropologist) and his disciples, Aby Warburg (art historian), Hans Henny Jahnn (novelist), Janheinz Jahn (literary broker and editor), Elias Canetti (writer), Will-Erich Peuckert (folklorist and historian), and Hubert Fichte (writer and journalist).
31This sketch remains misleading unless accompanied by a few cautionary clarifications:
32First, the possibility of appealing to a foreign and allochronic ecumene of humanity could also be understood as an occasion to boost one’s own claim to universality by appealing to an irreducibly foreign allochronic universality—as in the case of Aby Warburg. This attempt to amplify one’s own universality by appealing to the “primitive” could be artistic or scientific, it could be rooted in a belief in progress or in doubts about progress, it could be evolutionist or anti-evolutionist, Darwinist or anti-Darwinist, sincere, agnostic, or ironic, and it could also be embraced in a variety of guises by the very groups that were initially excluded from these historical processes as “primitive.” The writings of Frobenius were re-interpreted by Francophone “négritude”; the writings of Janheinz Jahn were read by free jazz musicians and later Africanist scholars, especially by the very mighty Robert Farris Thompson. This gloss suggests—once again—that a characterization based on the history of ideas or on reconstructing an “imagology” of modern primitivism are misleading, and that any reduction to the uniformity of a “discourse” will sooner or later reach its limits.
33Second, in modernity, literary primitivism is above all a correlate and continuation of the epistemological question of “primitive thought” that has permeated scholarship and philosophy at least since Tylor’s generalization of “animism.” As in Warburg’s self-characterization quoted above, it was precisely the promise of the striking articulation of aesthetic heteronomy that could be evoked in primitivism—as was essentially the case in most, if not all of the inspiration doctrines of the modern avant-gardes. It is high time to liberate the historical account of this promise of aesthetic heteronomy from claims about the pursuit of aesthetic autonomy—if this becomes an insight that literary studies and art histories will be able to grasp, after decades of believing that the high road of literary modernism was to follow the aspirations of literary self-referentiality.
- 26 Dieter Harmening, Superstitio. Überlieferungs- und theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur kirchli (...)
- 27 Cf. for example Alexandra Walsham, “Recording Superstition in Early Modern Britain: The Origins of (...)
- 28 Johann Philipp Gabler, quoted by Elinor S. Shaffer in: The Kubla Khan and The fall of Jerusalem:The (...)
34Third, the scholarly and literary practices by which primitive allochronism could be demonstrated, studied, and documented are, for the most part, older than modern primitivism. For example, Edward Tylor’s “survivals” are only the end of a long chain of categorizations used in Europe since antiquity to describe “superstition” as something “surviving” from the past, as a superstitio,26 i.e., as something that “sticks out” after history has flattened a territory and moved on; and since humanism found its material corollary in “antiquarianism,” when “antiquities” were collected, documented, and classified, and combined with the work of comparison and contact with non-European colonies. As far as the emergence of its archeological, philological and historicizing practices, and temporal attributions is concerned, modern primitivism cannot be understood as separate from modern cultural studies’ origins in the scholarly practices of antiquarianism, just as the modern concept of literature cannot be grasped without considering the universalization of what was first called “folk-lore” in the nineteenth century and which always included an irreducible reference to the allochronism of an “antiquity” of Europe and the colonies.27 And lest we forget that one of the crucial steps for the constitution of the modern primitive and his "modes of thought", in fact maybe the most crucial step of them all happened in Germany and in Göttingen, within modern bible criticism and within the higher criticism of antiquity, through the cold fusion and (formerly unthinkable) equation of "revelation" and "mythology". "Gabler puts the fateful question: Is not the primitive world everywhere the same? Ist nicht die Urwelt überall gleich?"28 And he wouldn't wait for an answer.
- 29 Lovejoy and Boas also discussed this genre in their Contributions to the History of Primitivism, am (...)
35Fourth, the primitivist boomerang effect of exclusivity—and especially the contradictory relationship between one’s own exclusivity and allochronic universalization—necessarily results in inversions and reversible figures. It was noted early on in anthropological practice, and then also in the ethnological study of primitivism, most pointedly in Germany by Fritz Kramer, that these inversions—this switching back and forth between different exclusivities—recall an entire genre of European literature, namely the “Persian Letters” of the eighteenth century.29 However, this literary legacy was only sporadically pursued at the margins of modernist literature through a modernization of the genre, and primarily carried forward through an unpredictable reversible figure, an endless pattern of interpretation and self-interpretation between the sciences, the humanities and the arts: modernity in the mirror of the primitive.