Primitivism

10 Key excerpts on "Primitivism"

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  Cross-Cultural Issues in Art

  Frames for Understanding

  • Steven Leuthold(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In addition to its specific historical formations, Primitivism can be thought of as a general principle of cultural interaction that began early in the history of human experience and continues in the present. Even today, Primitivism continues to infuse popular culture. Many films have focused on central figures who are primitives in inevitable conflict with modern civilization: for instance, Forrest Gump plays the primitive alter-ego to Lieutenant Dan who has been destroyed by the ambition, pride, and drugs of contemporary society; similarly Jodie Foster's role in Nell and the character created by Billy Bob Thornton in Slingblade are expressions of the primitive in conflict with modern culture. Marianna Torgovnick writes that the roots of Westerners’ relationship to the primitive are in the Homerian Odyssey. 1 Travel in all time periods serves as an education into the possibilities of social life, and, quite often, the cultures that travelers encounter may seem more primitive than their own in some way. Primitivism is not just a literary or philosophical idea. It affects behavior: The concepts associated with Primitivism influence peoples’ actions toward each other. Defining Primitivism The primitive is tied to that which is spontaneous, intuitive, simple, untrained, and natural. These qualities can be paired with opposites that indicate “developed” or modern cultures: planned, rational, complex, trained, and artificial (because of the impact of technology). Historically, the primitive was linked to other polarities, such as Christian versus heathen, that have been used to describe cultural others. Thus, qualities that appear attractive in the modern age—spontaneity, intuitiveness, simplicity—may have appeared unattractive in earlier periods when paired with these other polarities such as heathen

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  Theories of Art

  3. From Impressionism to Kandinsky

  • Moshe Barasch(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 “Chronological Primitivism” looks for the primitive in the earliest stages of history; “cultural Primitivism” looks for the primitive in cultures that differ from our own, regardless of their particular stage of history. Using this distinction we can say that to be a primitivist—whether in the “chronological” or “cultural” sense—one has to be aware that one's own world and culture differ from those considered primitive. It is only in developed societies, in cultures that have produced a rich reflective life of the mind, that we encounter such awareness, and hence also Primitivism.

  Yet Primitivism is not only an academic concern, that is, a description of the fact that some people or groups are concerned with realities they describe as “primitive,” whether these realities are remote in time (belonging to a distant past), or removed in space (found in other countries or other continents). In addition to being a purely intellectual concern, Primitivism is an attitude that aims to actively reshape one's own society or culture, or some part of it. Primitivism, as we know it from history, intended to make an impact on the real world. Primitivists were reformers; as a rule they attempted to recast their own world and model it on the “primitive” world they esteemed so highly. It has correctly been said that Primitivism is often a form of revolt against one's own world.2 As we shall see, this is also true with regard to Primitivism in reflection on art.

  From the beginning of historical, in fact of mythical, reflection in classical Antiquity, there were two different views of the primitive condition of man, termed by Lovejoy and Boas the “soft” and the “hard” view of our original state. While the “soft” view pictured primitive conditions in glowing colors, conjuring up an original happy state of man, the “hard” view saw these original conditions as full of hardship and danger, a thoroughly frightening and repulsive situation. It was “progress” that helped us to overcome this original condition. Believers in progress, it need hardly be said, did not preach forms of “Primitivism,” that is, they did not want to reform society to bring it closer to the original state of man. Whenever Primitivism was advocated, it was the “soft” view that prevailed.

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  The Primitivist Imaginary in Iberian and Transatlantic Modernisms

  • Joana Cunha Leal, Mariana Pinto dos Santos, Joana Cunha Leal, Mariana Pinto dos Santos(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Even if for all the wrong reasons, modernist artists bestowed “primitive” objects with a disruptive power able to threaten the bourgeois status quo and the highly formalised academicism institutionalised in the artistic field throughout the nineteenth century. Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten defined Primitivism in the context of modernism as “an act on the part of artists and writers seeking to celebrate features of the art and culture of people deemed ‘primitive’ and to appropriate their supposed simplicity and authenticity to the project of transforming Western art”. 15 And this is how, they add, a term that had mostly negative connotations ended up having positive valences as well. The positive valences ascribed to the “primitive” in this context arise in the framework of a look that, again, wipes all historical circumstances from objects observed. As Antliff and Leighten put it, the “primitive” belongs to the “mythic speech” as discussed by Roland Barthes, “for the label empties its referent of historical contingency and cultural specificity and instead subsumes it within an unchanging ‘nature’”. 16 This a-historical framework reinstated a promise of purity and authenticity that, besides constituting an alternative to the beaux-arts academicism, and the dominant visual culture masterfully instrumentalised by modernist artists in their primitivist productions, was also prone to regionalist or nationalist appropriations

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  Handbook of Material Culture

  • Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Mike Rowlands, Patricia Spyer, Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Mike Rowlands, Patricia Spyer(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Another line of evaluation asked if they could be viewed as a conceptual return to our lost (‘prim-itive’) selves, as suggested in the subtitle of another review: ‘Aboriginal art as a kind of cos-mic road map to the primeval’ (Wallach 1989). The conventions of their differences were also seen as morally instructive about some of our own associations, especially of our materi-alism. In his travels to Australia during the planning of the exhibition, Andrew Pekarik (then Director of the Asia Society Gallery) was reported as saying ‘that these people with prac-tically zero material culture have one of the most complex social and intellectual cultures of any society’ (in Cazdow 1987: 9). In this Romantic – and Durkheimian – construction, a critique of Modernity, the paintings may repre-sent the worthiness of Aboriginal survival and, consequently, the dilemma and indictment of SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS 276 modern Australia’s history and treatment of their forebears as less than human. POSITIONS FOR SIGNIFYING THE PRIMITIVE The construction of ‘Primitivism’ has a partic-ular salience for the production and circulation of political and cultural identities. At the same time, recent work argues that ‘Primitivism’ must be studied in its particular contexts, and it is increasingly realized that there is not a generic ‘Primitivism’. Nicholas Thomas (1999), for example, has written about the distinctive qualities of ‘settler Primitivism’, which should be distinguished from other operations of the trope. One might note, for example, the impor-tance of World War I – in the United States, Canada, and Australia – in leading these settler nations to pursue more actively an identity dis-tinct from that of Europe, the role this played in the development of interest in ‘primitive art’, and the appropriation of each country’s indigenous arts as part of the national cultural patrimony (see especially Mullin 1995).

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  Popular Bohemia

  Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris

  • Mary Gluck, Mary GLUCK(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  After centuries of identification with the external aspects of the natural world, Worringer pointed out, the moderns had emancipated themselves from their naturalistic and rationalist 166 The Primitivist Artist illusions and had returned to a more ancient, more mythic attitude to the outside world, whose appropriate expression was abstraction. 5 These declarations of aesthetic renewal and cultural rebirth were not entirely new to the Primitivists. The Decadent manifestoes of the mid-1880s, published by Anatole Baju and his followers, had already celebrated the creative and regenerative potential of modern art. 6 Unlike the Deca-dents, however, the Primitivists did more than proclaim the utopian future of modern art. They also redefined contemporary aesthetic idioms by sev-ering their final links with nineteenth-century realism and naturalism. It was the Primitivists who carried through the momentous breakthrough to abstraction or “pure art” that was to characterize much of twentieth-century modernism. Less frequently thematized, however, were the cultural aspects of this revolution. For Primitivism signaled a realignment not only in avant-garde practices, but also in artistic identities. Indeed, with Primitivism, the nature of bohemia itself was reconstituted under the changed conditions of twentieth-century modernity. The complexities of this cultural transformation would lead avant-garde artists to form a romantic identification with the non-European and the antimodern, as well as the exoticized images that Europeans themselves created to represent their colonial “Other.” Paradoxically, it was through engagement with the problematic discourses of exoticism, Orientalism, and evolutionary theory that the modernist artists were to distill their own unique visions of the Primitive.

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  First Follow Nature

  Primitivism in English Poetry 1725-1750

  • Margaret M. Fitzgerald(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Cultural Primitivism M AN'S desire to get away from it all motivates his cul-tural Primitivism. 1 Periodically tiring of the complexities of civilization, he dreams of a simpler way of life. 2 The city man wants five acres and independence. The rich man (in literature at least) wearies of wealth's responsibilities and envies the lot of his poorer neighbor. The adventurous spirit longs for the pioneer days of rugged frontiersmen, the timid soul for the sunlit safety of a South Sea Isle. One and all are attempting to ac-complish the same end—that is, to find a less intricate design for living. As cultural primitivists early eighteenth-century poets make no pretence of hardihood. Pleasure, not pioneering is their watch-word, and although now and then a more venturesome writer will admire the rugged simplicity of a far-off people, for the most part the poets, with due regard for their floury wigs and flowered waist-coats, hail relaxation and enjoyment as the chief blessings of an ideal community. Although by the seventeen-nineties the vogue of cultural prim-itivism had ranged from the country gentleman to the noble savage, with the latter skyrocketing in popularity as the century pro-gressed, the first fifty years of the century show traditional sub-jects strongly entrenched, and the more exotic aspects of cultural Primitivism decidedly in the minority. The early poets have little to say about the noble savage or about hard and soft extremes of life on foreign shores: they are content with such stock themes as pastoral life, rural retirement, and the innate superiority of the man of humble means. C U L T U R A L P R I M I T I V I S M I These nations then seem to me to be so far from bar-barous, . . . The laws of nature govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours; .

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  In the Flesh

  The Cultural Politics of Body Modification

  • V. Pitts(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  place. 60 This use of the category of “primitive” potentially sustains views of tribal and Third World peoples as essentially, and not merely culturally, different. 61 In seeking Primitivism as a universal category, Aidan Campbell complains that modern Primitivism has been ac- cused of glossing over the vastness, complexity, and variation of tribal heritages. 62 Certainly, the historical, geographic, and political con- texts of traditional cultures are greatly diminished in its representa- tion of Primitivism, which highlights neither the differences between tribal groups nor the negative aspects of traditional cultures. In fact, despite incessant references to tribal cultures, no interviewee in my research mentioned any problematic feature of any non-Western cul- ture or traditional ritual, including African female genital mutilation, which is now widely recognized as a major human rights problem. Criticisms of indigenous cultures and historical practices in the sub- cultural literature are also rare. BP&MPQ remains celebratory about footbinding and corsetry, for instance, while largely ignoring their deeply oppressive histories. In asserting the view of tribal cultures as uniformly positive, progres- sive, and otherwise superior, modern primitives believe that their practices are antithetical to racism, colonialism, and the negative effects of global- ization. Yet, as Valerie Eubanks and Christian Kleese argue, modern prim- itivism not only romanticizes tribal groups, but also fetishizes them as it projects white Western desires onto the bodies of non-Westerners. Kleese describes how the “gender-specific sexualization” of indigenous bodies has been historically coded into colonial narratives, including those employed in National Geographic, a text that has been highly influential to modern primitives.

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  Cultural Identity and Global Process

  • Jonathan Friedman(Author)
  • 1994(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  3 CIVILIZATIONAL CYCLES AND THE HISTORY OF Primitivism This chapter was written just before the ascendency of the by now common critique of ethnographic authority and the anthropological distancing of the other (Fabian, 1983). It was conceived as a suggestion as to the kinds of processes that ought to be investigated in order to establish a self-reflexive anthropology. It explicitly attempts to grasp the extent to which certain core anthropological concepts and categories of otherness are constants of a particular kind of civilization and how they change systemically over time. It calls on us to consider the forms of our thought and their derivation as part of a process of social positioning in the world. There has been a revival of interest in Primitivism and culturalism in recent years (the early 1980s) that I shall suggest is not a mere random development or a realization that such things are important. It is not unusual to find yesterday's evolutionists transformed into today's primi-tivists. Marshall Sahlins' transition from evolutionism and materialism to culturalism and Primitivism is paradigmatic in this respect. Even hard-nosed cultural materialists have been forced to take a skeptical view of evolution. Marvin Harris, who once claimed that stratified societies evolved 'because they were more efficient than their predecessors in meeting the metabolic needs of larger populations' (Harris, 1963: 304), is now forced to recognize that 'Much of what we think of as contemporary progress is actually a regaining of standards that were widely enjoyed during prehistoric times' (Harris, 1977: x). But even the radical rethinkers are lost in the ideological space of this civilization and have not made an effort to understand the historical conditions of their own existence. This might be too much to ask in general, but it is a life-and-death issue for a science of society.

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  Political Philosophy for the Global Age

  • M. Sanchez-Flores, Kenneth A. Loparo, Mónica Judith Sánchez-Flores(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This view involves not only belief, but also an emotional involvement with the content of particular belief. This content has to do with what is really important to specific social and cultural settings (Warner 1994). Human groups within specific cultural settings will act according to the content of their belief—even with passionate urgency. The modern person’s realm of primitive M.J.S. Flores, Political Philosophy for the Global Age © Mónica Judith Sánchez Flores 2005 experience is projected either unto Modernity’s own past, or unto a realm of otherness whose voice is impossible to represent faithfully (as the postcolonial studies debate illustrates). Therefore, in order to conceptually elaborate this ideal type of reality, I resort to the modern conception of primitivity as archaic. Nevertheless, primitivity is very much a characteristic of human beings around the world right now. According to Northrop Frye, people are unable to live nakedly in nature like animals, and this does not refer only to the human physi- cal need to dress; he speaks about a mythological universe: “a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his [human] existential con- cerns” (Frye 1982, xviii). He believes that the conscious organizing of a cultural tradition is the practical function of criticism, and this should make us more aware of our mythical conditioning. In this ideal type, I consider human emotional primary involvement that allows for the ideal–typical primitive awareness of ecstatic wholeness. This wholeness legitimizes the living authority of a particular cosmology or belief, and in its collective manifestation, it is experienced most clearly during the time of ritual festivity. According to Paz (1993), the above type of time is congenial with the one in which poetic creativity takes place, as it allows for a kind of knowledge that cannot be articulated except in poetic expression, that is, in metaphoric verbal structures.

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  From Fetish to Subject

  Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919-1935

  • Carole Sweeney(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  This is not a plea for a brand of postcolonial theorising in which interstitial agency or the subtleties of hybridity and textuality define and even supersede material considera- tions. In other words, the inequities of the colonial situation itself do not account for nor precisely reproduce aesthetic and cultural engagements that may occur as a result of this underlying subjugation. NOTES 1. See in particular Hulme and Carter on the new cartographies produced by the colonial encounter. 2. On the histories and representational practices of Primitivism and exoticism, see Torgovnick; Price; Bongie; Laude; Pieterse; Frascina and Harris, and Archer Shaw. Attention to interwar Primitivism in France has tended to remain in the disciplinary domain of art history; the most recent work is Jody Blake's Le Tumulte sity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 3. The category of Primitivism has been extended to incorporate a more general allegory process of "othering," particularly in the case of class. There has been a considerable amount of work done on the ways in which the working class has been primitivised in both British and French contexts. See Lindsay Smith on Vic- torian street urchins and Gill Perry on representation of Breton peasants in visual arts in Frascina and Harris. Noir: Modernist Art and Popidar Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris 1900-1930 (Univer- 34 From Fetish to Subject 4. It is more difficult to place representations of First Nation peoples. Those of North America have generally straddled both categories, as have the aboriginal peoples of Central and South America and Australasia. See Nicholas Thomas for a very detailed and useful discussion of contemporary uses of Primitivism in Hol- lywood cinema (170-95). 5. The novel is of course renowned for more than its depiction of a primitive otherness, but it is precisely this representation of the non-West that has been the subject of much of the most fervent critical commentary.

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