Primitivism Now, Primitivism Again: Introduction

Abstract

WHY IS THERE STILL PRIMITIVISM? The utopian project to dismantle modernity on the basis of an imagined primitive condition has had many seeming endpoints. It should have ended when aesthetic modernism, with which it was so closely tied, was transcended. It should have ended when the Western ethnographic category of the “primitive,” on which it supposedly depended, was discredited. It should have ended when critical theory exposed its adulation of the primitive “Other” as appropriative and racist. It should have ended when the “civilization” from within which it articulates subsumed the furthest reaches of the planet. Yet it persists.

Unabashedly primitivist adventure narratives like James Cameron’s Avatar are among the highest-grossing twenty-first-century films. Reality TV series like Alone trade on a popular fascination with those who abruptly exit civilization to live in nature. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s best-selling The Dawn of Everything critiques the ideal of a lost egalitarian state of nature only to substitute it with the ideal of an originary political creativity. The rewilding movement postulates an ecological “baseline” deep in the past to agitate for humanity’s reentry into a “wild” state, often extolling Indigenous communities as exemplars (Monbiot). As recent scholarship has argued, primitivism also exceeded the borders that were meant to have contained it: there is primitivism of colonized peoples (Etherington); Jewish primitivism (Spinner); the primitivism of those on Europe’s periphery (Paris); postmodern primitivism (Li); posthuman primitivism (Lillywhite), among others. Broadly condemned by scholars in the 1980s and 1990s, primitivism has largely been sidelined in recent critical debates. But not only has the primitivist impulse persisted, theoretical developments across a range of disciplines, especially ecocriticism, global modernism, and decolonial theory, make it clear that primitivism’s extent has not been sufficiently explored.

Amid primitivism’s resurgence under the specter of climate catastrophe and in view of its capacity to manifest in a variety of contexts and periods, this special issue reconsiders its conceptual, cultural, and temporal frames. Each of its essays offers the opportunity to consider four key questions: Why has there been (and why does there continue to be) primitivism in places where it “shouldn’t” be? Why has previous scholarship excluded many of these contexts? Is a revision of our understanding of primitivism called for by these alternative primitivisms? If so, what does this new perspective reveal? The essays in this special issue look at articulations of primitivism from its canonical period in the early twentieth century up to the present. Each suggests that primitivism has always done more than its most enduring scholarly definitions have allowed for. Each shows that, as Simon Gikandi eloquently argues in this issue’s afterword, despite its exoticism, its essentialism, and its racism, primitivism was—and perhaps remains—a potent critique of the very epistemologies and social systems that generated its most objectionable elements.

Above all, primitivism remains. It remains insufficiently studied in the range of its historical expressions across languages and geographies, and it remains an element of contemporary culture, as challenging as ever to track as it moves sometimes with and sometimes against the current. A recent literary affair reveals how primitivism continues to confound. On June 12, 2023, best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert announced that her new novel, slated for release in 2024, would be indefinitely postponed. The novel was touted in its blurb as “a dramatic story of one wild and mysterious girl in a pristine wilderness, and of the mystical connection between humans and the natural world.”¹ It seems to be inspired by the Lykovs, a family of Russian Old Believers who spent much of the twentieth century voluntarily isolated in Siberia. Gilbert said that she chose to withdraw her novel in response to outrage voiced by many Ukrainians while Russia wages war on them; she did not want to “add any harm to a group of people” suffering so much already (see Gilbert).

The debate that ensued was largely about the book’s political implications, seen through the lens of freedom of expression. Did Gilbert’s decision to withhold her novel challenge Russian aggression or capitulate to it? Did silencing herself amplify Ukrainian voices? Did restricting her own freedom (of expression) contribute to the expansion of others’ freedom (to live)? There was, it seems, no consideration of what a novel could do or what this novel might have done. The novel’s premise alone promises a critique of Russian imperialism and an exposé of its devastating consequences: the genocide of many of Siberia’s Indigenous peoples and the plundering of Siberia’s environment. Although it is impossible to know without reading the novel, the synopsis describes a story about the bond between a “wild girl” and “pristine wilderness.” The wildness of its protagonist, an ethnic Russian, is a metaleptic displacement of Siberia’s original inhabitants. Perhaps the novel would, in that significant regard, have reified the ethnic cleansing and land theft now perpetrated by Russia. But it might also, at the same time, have exposed the destructive forces now at work in Ukraine by imagining wild people and places seemingly untouched by Russia’s destructive forces. This is the double bind of primitivism: the force of its critique emerges from the very forces it critiques. This explosive power, a kind of civilizational fission, explains why it was once a central element of art and literature and why, though no longer acknowledged as central, it persists. But it also explains why it has been easy to overlook those forms of primitivism hidden in the shadows of ambivalence in favor of less challenging, less compromised modes of critique.

Primitivism Then

The scholarly study of primitivism began in the 1930s with two major books. The first, Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas’s Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935), approached primitivism as a case study in the history of ideas. It was to be the first volume of a documentary history of primitivism up to their time; it appeared in a series on primitivism that had already featured a number of entries. So many books were planned because the authors’ conception of primitivism was capacious. It was, at root, the history of “civilized man’s misgivings about his performances, about his prospects—and about himself” (ix). This was a phenomenon “chiefly in the Occident” but spread throughout the world and across time. A framework that capacious could not account for primitivism’s appearance at particular historical moments and in culturally situated contexts; it imagined primitivism as an idea to be extracted from the canonical works of antiquity, including Greek and Roman philosophy, and the religious texts of the ancient Near East and South Asia, all of which Lovejoy and Boas survey. But what we commonly conceive of as primitivism appears in the twentieth century—the period of its greatest flourishing—as visual art, literature, music, and performance, not primarily as philosophy. While Freud and Spengler (the two twentieth-century examples named by Lovejoy and Boas) were important for the development of ideas related to primitivism, they did not catalyze a theory of primitivism. Picasso did. More broadly, the rapid spread of primitivist aesthetics in different areas of transatlantic modernism prompted the second major theorization of primitivism, also from the 1930s: Robert Goldwater’s Primitivism in Modern Painting (1938). Goldwater’s early account of the undeniably prominent place of primitivism in modernist painting was definitive, and art history henceforth came to be seen as the central discipline for the theorization of primitivism. Contrary to Lovejoy and Boas, primitivism was not an idea but an artistic vehicle for an impulse or an ideal. And so, for the most part, it remained. This is attributable in part to the enormous fame and influence of the artists associated with primitivism: Gauguin, Matisse, Kandinsky, Nolde, and above all Picasso. It is also, however, due to the invention of “primitive” as a category associated with ethnographic showcases and museums. This ethnographic category was substantiated in part by objects that were displayed in museums, often free of explanation or context, and that were therefore apprehensible only visually. The visual encounter with these “primitive” objects in museums became the mythical story of origin for the innovations of Gauguin, Picasso, and Wilhelm Worringer, an early theorist of abstraction in art (Gluck 157). According to this understanding, primitivism—the visual primitivism of European modernism, that is—like the European museums that catalyzed it, depended on ethnography’s creation of the primitive and, as is now seen much more clearly, on the wider biopolitical regime of European imperialism. In the retrospective gaze of Goldwater and the critics and scholars writing in his wake, primitivism itself emerged from the ethnographic presentation of objects and the digestion of these objects in modernist visual art.

Framing primitivism within the specific historical and cultural moment of the adoption of an ethnographic idea by visual artists made it difficult to consider not only modes of primitivism in other cultural media but even visual primitivisms not anchored as closely to the ethnographic category of the primitive. Goldwater himself discusses the role played in the primitivism of various artists by folk art, “psychopathic” art, art by children, and the art of medieval Europe. Yet, despite its variety, primitivism was typically understood to be characterized by the musealized colonial encounter and mechanisms of influence that have come to be critiqued as appropriation. This was the view that engendered the epoch-ending 1984 exhibition “‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The debate unleashed in its wake made clear that the types of primitivist art enshrined in the MOMA exhibition, and in the master narratives of art history that underpinned it, were complicit in propagating the ongoing deleterious effects of colonialism and its cultural politics. In short, this type of primitivism—which seemed to encompass all primitivism—was and remained racist, and its method was appropriation.

In the decades since the seemingly decisive critiques of these white primitivisms of the North Atlantic, the shape, breadth, and character of primitivism has started to be reconsidered as scholars from a range of disciplines have explored primitivisms that do not fit the patterns that we have just outlined. These include considerations of the primitivism of the Irish Revival (Garrigan Mattar); the Harlem Renaissance (Lemke; McCabe; Ryan), the negritude movement (Britton; Etherington); Latin America and Iberia (Camayd-Freixas; Leal and Santos); Africa (Collier); India (Varma); Europe’s peripheries, including eastern European Jewish culture (Manouelian; Zavgorodny-Freedman; Spinner; Paris); Russia (Howard, Bužinska, and Strother; Kunichika); white settler–colonial contexts beyond North America (Kirkpatrick; Campbell); postcolonial contexts more broadly (Li); and reappraisals of the nature and scope of primitivism in its western European heartland (Gess; Dagen; Le Quellec Cottier and Rodriguez). Rashmi Varma has recently begun to inquire into the “politics and aesthetics of a radical anticolonial primitivism” (423) by looking at the work of the Indian modernist sculptor Ramkinkar Baij and the Indigenist Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui in Peru. For Sharma, their work reveals not a single shared “global” primitivism but a dialectic of different primitivist modes and forms spanning a global capitalist system marked by combined and uneven development. Primitivism, Varma writes, is “inevitably contaminated by colonial violence” but also entails “resistance to it,” including articulations “enmeshed in an internationalist modernism” (423).²

The range and breadth of these inquiries raise the question whether the now decades-old critiques of primitivism need supplementation if not fundamental reappraisal. The contributors to this special issue, which includes articles developed from papers presented at the symposium “Eccentric Primitivisms” held at Johns Hopkins University in April 2022, explore primitivist articulations in a range of contexts and historical moments, in each case probing at the limits of established conceptions, geographies, and temporalities. Collectively they seek not a unitary paradigm but to raise new questions about a phenomenon that can seem to have fallen from view.

Inside and Outside Primitivism

Broadening the purview of scholarship on primitivism beyond its canonical western European and North American iterations, however, comes with risks and challenges that need to be addressed. It should always be recognized that the root term primitive played a central role in the formation of several disciplines in the social and biological sciences that were built on racist and racializing assumptions. These persisted deep into the twentieth century, and their legacies are still felt. Primitivism is undeniably enmeshed in the epistemology of the colonial project. To consider as primitivist the work of artists and thinkers from cultural, racial, or social groups who were, in many cases, subjugated or marginalized for being “primitive” or “savage” risks imposing a concept that is not just unsuitable but actively anathema. Even critical uses of primitivism in such circumstances might only renew and reinforce the civilized/primitive binary whose real social and political effects have been so destructive. Yet, as is evident in recent scholarship and the essays in this issue, the aspiration to the condition of primitivity (or synonymous terms) can be found in the work and thought of artists and thinkers from a wide range of backgrounds who were active in a number of contexts. For example, as Alys Moody documents in her essay, there are direct continuities from the work of white primitivists like Paul Morand and the youthful polemics of key writers of the negritude movement, and these would be critiqued for being primitivist by figures once associated with negritude—critics like Frantz Fanon and René Ménil, who came to regard the primitivist dimension of negritude as a mental colonization. Other critics have sought to recuperate negritude by regarding its primitivism as an appropriation and resignification of white primitivism (Li).

To clarify the stakes involved in conceptualizing a spectrum of cultural phenomena as primitivist, it’s worth briefly revisiting how the term primitive came to be selected from among a number of similar terms that could just as well have served as the master concept for the mode of idealization it names. There are many ways in which the expressed yearning for a more natural, more simple, more authentic, more immediate, more primal, more rudimentary, more barbarous, more savage, more feral, more wild existence could have been conceptualized—the same goes for negations like uncivilized and unsophisticated—and each could have been the root for an -ism, an -ing, or a -ness. (Of course, some were, though to different effect, as with naturalism.) Critics and scholars landed on primitivism, and the term came to encompass forms of cultural expression in which one or more among this cluster of desires is strongly evident. The concept of the “primitive” has a long history in English and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s etymology, in its early phases, it was solely a temporal concept, referring to an earlier or original state, whether one’s “primitive” ancestors or an institution such as the “primitive church.”³ Individuals or social groups who were regarded as uncivilized or as existing in a state of nature were more often labeled “barbarous” or “savage,” per the coining of “noble savage” by John Dryden in 1670 (Dryden 30). It was only with the acceleration of European colonialism and urbanization in the eighteenth century that primitive acquired a contemporaneous dimension.⁴ It could now be used to refer to currently existing cultural others that Europeans regarded as belonging to preliterate nonindustrial societies (or to those sections of their own societies). This was coincident with developments in history, archaeology, and anthropology that drew speculative (and false) parallels between the historical condition of Europeans and the current condition of some of the societies that European empires were in the midst of colonizing. This temporal and geographical extensibility gave primitive greater breadth than its near synonyms, and as it was adopted by the emerging social sciences, anthropology in particular, the term began to harden into factuality. Within the order of colonial reason, the primitive came to denote particular kinds of societies and forms of life which were documented and taxonomized accordingly.

Only at this point—the mid-nineteenth century—did the term primitivism emerge, and it was not until the early twentieth century that artists and thinkers whose work in some way aspires to a primitive condition began to be labeled primitivists. However, the artists and thinkers concerned by no means confined themselves to primitive when characterizing the aspirations of their work, and continued to employ the gamut of terms mentioned above along with others. (D. H. Lawrence, often regarded as the archetypal literary primitivist, strongly favors “savage.”)⁵ Primitivism is thus quite unusual among the isms of the early twentieth century: from the start it was applied externally by critics and scholars rather than being adopted by artists and thinkers themselves (as was the case for futurism, surrealism, cubism, vorticism, etc.). It seems the association with the social sciences (see Garrigan Mattar) and its chronological and cultural extensibility bestowed on primitivism the broadest conceptual purchase when characterizing trends in aesthetic and intellectual life that idealize a natural, primitive, authentic, savage, or immediate form of life.

So even before necessary questions were raised about primitivism’s problematic racial and gender politics, criticism and scholarship had been faced with the challenge of determining the appropriate conceptual and cultural limits for an aesthetic and cultural tendency whose exponents rarely employed the term itself. One way to break this down is to reflect on where uses of the term are “emic”—that is, where they resonate with the language used in the cultural context and historical moment concerned—and where “etic”—that is, where applied externally.⁶ Take the essays and theoretical pronouncements of the surrealists discussed by Joyce Cheng in this issue. Surrealists did not describe themselves as primitivists, but Cheng shows how notions of primitivity were directly drawn into the surrealist’s cultural project as part of her reconstruction of how artists and thinkers from the different surrealist camps latched onto “magic” to catalyze a new way of thinking about technique and the production of art. This includes debts to works like Olivier Leroy’s Primitive Reason. To very different effect, Alys Moody considers the character of the primitivism evident in Suzanne Césaire’s contributions to the surrealist Martinican literary magazine Tropiques. Instead of directing her idealism toward a cultural other, Césaire undertakes what Samuel Spinner calls “genealogical” primitivism: the idealization of the “primitive” condition of one’s ancestors (101). In her essay “A Civilization’s Discontent,” for instance, Césaire frames Martinicans’ rejections of slavery and “civilized” forms of labor as an “explosion of the primitive self” (Richardson 99) that wants to tap an “ancestral desire for abandon.” In both cases, the critical application of primitivism meets the language of the artistic milieu concerned, even as the social contexts, identities, and political valences of these primitivisms are very different.

Things get more complicated when we come to Václav Paris on the work of Amos Tutuola. With regard to the publication and reception of Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952), we are clearly in the emic realm. Critics hailed Tutuola’s work as that of a “true primitive,” and this was a reception that was consciously cultivated by his British editors. Their editorial decisions, sometimes in direct contradiction to Tutuola’s wishes, attempted to present his work, Paris writes, “as a more ‘primitive’ primitivity than could be achieved by self-conscious primitivists.” Writing in Nigeria and well away from arenas in which surrealism and primitivism were being debated, Tutuola hardly used such terms when describing his practice. Yet, Paris argues, his work cannily anticipates and manipulates the codes and binaries of civilized/primitive according to which it was received, and Paris makes the case for considering the “vital landscape” of Tutuola’s representation of the Nigerian bush in the terms of primitivism. We are now in the realm of the etic, for which primitivism points not to a social category but to the idealization of that which “cannot easily be processed and incorporated into the machinery of instrumental utility.”

When we come to Etherington on the contemporary phenomenon of rewilding, we are dealing with a discourse that is conducted on quite different conceptual grounds. While there are demonstrable links between rewilding and primitivism, Etherington’s contention that rewilding is a transmutation of primitivism rests on an etic application. Rewilding is not primitivist because its exponents idealize those they regard as “primitive” but because it reproduces the logic of primitivist idealization as it tries to imagine “wild” forms of human life. Rewilding has not yet received anything like the critical scrutiny applied to primitivism, showing that the risks of etic applications of primitivism run both ways. To eschew etic uses can mean that historical connections between past and present forms of primitivism are missed and that the insights gained from the critique of well-known manifestations of primitivism are not extended to cognate phenomena. As Simon Gikandi puts it in the afterword, the essays in this issue explore the “conceptual and methodological possibilities of working within the prison house of the vocabularies that we have inherited from literary or art history” rather than trying to evade them.

What this serves to underline is that primitivism continues to be useful as a comparative concept, affording insight into how a persistent tendency manifests in a wide range of cultural discourses and artistic practices in different cultural and historical circumstances. As we saw in the pioneering works of Lovejoy and Boas, and Goldwater, primitivism was first conceptualized for the purposes of comparison. The contributors to this issue have no inherent attachment to primitivism as the master concept for all current and historical modes of idealizing life forms regarded as being close to nature, authentic, primal, and so on. Further, we recognize that all deployments of the concept need to be attentive to the risks of ramifying the harmful frameworks that have informed so much primitivist art and thought. The concept should always be used critically and with an eye to whether it affords genuine critical insight or merely imposes itself on the object it had hoped to examine.

The essays in this special issue emphatically show that primitivism is not singular. Looking at articulations of primitivism in a range of social contexts, the contributors do not merely apply the concept; they develop it. Rafael Cardoso shows how the painter Dimitri Ismailovitch—born in Kyiv, longtime resident of Turkey, immigrant to Brazil—turned to depicting Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian subjects as an effort to close the chapter of his life characterized by exile. Finally settled in Brazil, Ismailovitch sought to gain entry to an elite that bought and displayed paintings and also to join the culture he portrayed. Ismailovitch’s primitivism is not a story of “going away” to make art (Perry 8) but of making art to go home. Joyce Cheng reconsiders the humanism of surrealist primitivism by demonstrating that surrealist engagements with the concept of magic sought to invert the self-aggrandizing universalism of European civilization and to assert what Cheng calls the “universal primitive.” Václav Paris’s essay on Tutuola shows how a writer working from the standpoint of the colonized anticipates the celebration of his work as “primitive” not through a rejection of imperialist civilized/primitive binaries but by creatively manipulating them to open a space for his own eccentric primitivist idealism. Alys Moody’s essay on negritude and anticolonial primitivism shows that the critique of negritude’s antimodernism and essentialism did not originate with deconstruction but from productive tensions within the negritude movement itself as its political stakes were revealed in the era of decolonization. Moody suggests that echoes of negritude’s primitivism can be found in contemporary antiracism and anticolonialism.

Turning to the latter decades of the twentieth century, Samuel Spinner’s essay on the American poet Jerome Rothenberg identifies a distinctive primitivism in his work, bringing together his “ethnopoetic” focus on Indigenous (especially Native American) poetries, his poems purporting to reflect the Jewish folk culture of eastern Europe, and his Holocaust poetry. Rothenberg’s approach is guided by the fear of extinction—not the fantasy of disappearance that motivated salvage ethnography and many earlier artistic representations of Indigenous peoples (Brantlinger; Gruber) but the extinction of all humans and all cultures. Rothenberg’s work articulates the belief that only poetry has the power to forestall extinction, because only poetry can express the primal humanity that is the one force that might resist genocide, environmental destruction, and cultural loss. Ben Etherington’s essay on the contemporary rewilding movement takes up primitivism’s ecological dimensions, arguing that rewilding has transmuted primitivism’s logic into the twenty-first century. Ostensibly preoccupied with nature, rewilding has also renewed human-centric primitivism by drawing on conceptions of hunter-gatherer societies as it projects itself toward a speculative “wild” condition. In the afterword, Simon Gikandi reflects on each of the essays in detail while also making his own robust theoretical contribution. He invokes Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntal reading to call for dialectical and dialogical readings of primitivism. Gikandi reads Chinua Achebe’s Arrows of God as a riposte to the decontextualization and immobilization of African masks in European museums; by showing a “mask in motion,” Achebe’s text illuminates the “deep, primal forces and the presence of being” associated with masks in Igbo culture.

Together, the essays do not propose a new framework let alone theory of primitivism, but they also do not suggest that primitivism is endlessly plural and malleable. Each explores the diverse ways in which a lost condition (of nature, simplicity, authenticity, immediacy, and the like) is idealized by those who have just discovered this loss and who feel themselves implicated in the process that has caused it. This kind of idealism is not just the preference for a more natural state (whether winsome or repellent) but also for one that seeks to renew that state’s condition of possibility, and that therefore must pitch itself against the order of things that has imperiled it. In seeking to continue to extend the purview of primitivism beyond its most iconic manifestations in white North Atlantic modernism, this issue is centrally concerned with a utopianism expressing a desire for the thing just discovered to be lost. This desire is not a transhistorical constant but the product of a human world that has, for at least a century, been straining at our planet’s material limits. The extreme utopian responses expressing this desire are the negative image of the crises advanced by the gearwork of capitalist modernity: genocide, extinction, and environmental destruction. In this light, primitivism is the transformation of longing born of loss into hope for the future.

Notes

Works Cited