The Neo-primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity

305 Pages·2006·2.21 MB·English

by  Victor Li

THE NEO-PRIMITIVIST TURN:
CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON ALTERITY, CULTURE,
AND MODERNITY
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VICTOR LI
The Neo-primitivist Turn
Critical Reflections on Alterity,
Culture, and Modernity
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 10: 0-8020-9111-3
ISBN 13: 978-0-8020-9111-6
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Li, Victor, 1952–
The neo-primitivist turn : critical reflections on alterity, culture,
and modernity / Victor Li.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-9111-3
1. Primitive societies. 2. Primitivism. I. Title.
GN316.L52 2006 306 C2006-900655-5
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to
its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid
to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for
its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
1 The Neo-primitivist Turn
From the ‘Savage Slot’ to the Critique of Modernity 3
Anti-primitivist Primitivism 16
Primitivism without Primitives, or Towards Alterity, Culture,
and Modernity 32
2 Alterity: Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard,
Marianna Torgovnick
The Premodern Condition: Baudrillard, Lyotard,
and Radical Otherness 46
Primitives Are Us: Torgovnick, the Oceanic,
and the Feminine 67
3 Culture: Marshall Sahlins
Sahlins, Captain Cook, and the Apotheosis of Culture 87
‘Penseé Sauvage’ and Cultural Holism 102
Historical Change and Structural Continuity 116
How ‘Natives’ Think: Different Cultures, Different
Rationalities 127
4 Modernity: Jürgen Habermas
‘Followed as if by a shadow’: Habermas’s Other Discourse
of Modernity 153
vi Contents
The Linguistification of the Premodern: From Myth
to Modernity 168
Rationality, Loss, and the Recovery of the Premodern Other 200
Conclusion ‘Theorizing always needs a Savage’ 218
Notes 229
References 267
Index 281
Preface
Knowing as we do today that there have never existed peoples un-
touched by history, why do we continue to believe that such groups of
people, by-passed by modern history, still exist? Why do we still believe in
the idea of the primitive when the term ‘primitive’ itself has been
increasingly withdrawn from circulation? Why still harp on the primitive
when we have been made aware that primitive society was an invention
of the modern West? These questions insistently frame the example that
follows. In the summer of 2003, the Canadian newspaper the Globe and
Mail featured in its book review section a photograph of ‘an Aboriginal
group in Australia ... doing a traditional dance. Leaves are attached to
their ankles and emu plumes adorn their headdresses.’ Exoticism visu-
ally established, a brief entry under the photograph summarized the
contents of the book under review: ‘As the world becomes increasingly
globalized and as McDonald’s [sic] sprouts on seemingly every corner,
there are still small pockets where individual cultures and ethnic groups
survive. In Living Tribes, Colin Prior gives a spectacular photographic
record of fifteen such peoples, from the Inuit to the Padaung of Thai-
land to the Turkana of the Kenyan desert.’1 We will no doubt notice,
especially in these politically enlightened times, that the word ‘primitive’
does not appear in the description. Instead, acceptable terms like ‘indi-
vidual cultures,’ ‘ethnic groups,’ or ‘living tribes’ are used. But even
though the denigration implied by evolutionary ranking is lifted when
the word ‘primitive’ is studiously avoided, it is less easy to avoid the
suspicion that ‘individual cultures’ or ‘ethnic groups’ may just be euphe-
misms inasmuch as they are still employed as concepts opposed, as
‘primitive’ once was, to a globalizing modernity. In other words, termi-
nological replacements for ‘primitive’ remain mere euphemisms if they
viii Preface
continue to function conceptually and rhetorically as endangered an-
titheses to the modern West.
To be sure, unlike ‘primitive,’ which is burdened by a history of
derogation, the new terms are greeted positively as expressions of cul-
tural resistance against the threat of a homogenizing modernity, the
coming of a monocultural McWorld. But the avoidance of the word
‘primitive,’ far from signifying a complete rejection of primitivism, rep-
resents instead primitivism’s transmutation into the liberal creed of
multiculturalism, the preservation of cultural diversity in the age of
globalization. Politically acceptable terms like ‘individual culture’ and
‘ethnic group’ may appear to oppose evolutionary narratives of primitive
inferiority, but they still fall into the ‘savage slot’ that primitivism has
always reserved for the Other of Euro-American modernity.2 We should
also note that the ‘primitive,’ as a chronopolitical concept, is related to
terms such as the ‘premodern,’ the ‘archaic,’ and ‘traditional’ or ‘tribal’
societies. These terms may have different temporal inflections than
‘primitive,’ but they are often used as equivalents of the latter, especially
in their perceived common opposition to the concept of modernity.
Like Orientalism, primitivism functions as a grab-bag concept into which
everything that is seen as opposed to the modern West is gathered. As
such, any study of primitivism (and mine is no different) must acknowl-
edge that the term ‘primitive’ lacks singular definition and possesses
protean, multiple identities. The ‘primitive’ is not an ontological entity;
it is a relational concept that expresses various ‘modern’ needs.
The story of the ‘savage slot’ and its related manifestations is well
known and has been critically analysed in such notable works as Johannes
Fabian’s Time and the Other, Adam Kuper’s The Invention of Primitive Society,
Bernard McGrane’s Beyond Anthropology, Marianna Torgovnick’s Gone
Primitive, Micaela di Leonardo’s Exotics at Home, Shelly Errington’s The
Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress, Elazar Barkan
and Ronald Bush’s collection Prehistories of the Future, Helen Carr’s Invent-
ing the American Primitive, Sieglinde Lemke’s Primitivist Modernism, Peter
Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of Modern Law, and Nicholas Thomas’s
Colonialism’s Culture.3 A new perspective can, nonetheless, be introduced
to complicate this familiar story. Our awareness of the chronopolitics
and geopolitics of primitivism, an awareness we owe in large part to the
studies mentioned above, has not led to the disappearance of primitiv-
ism but to its deeper imbrication in contemporary theoretical discourses
that appear to be anti-primitivist and politically progressive.4 This book
seeks to understand why primitivism keeps reappearing even after it has
Preface ix
been uncovered as a myth, a projection, or a construction necessary for
establishing the modernity of the West. It examines the ways in which a
deconstructed primitivism is replaced by ‘neo-primitivism.’
By ‘neo-primitivism’ I mean the conceptual move through which the
rejection of primitivism allows it to reappear in new, more acceptable
forms. Neo-primitivism is a contemporary version of primitivism in which
the critical repudiation of earlier primitivist discourses paradoxically
enables their re-introduction, under different names and configurations
to be sure, as cultural, political, ethical, and aesthetic alternatives to
Western modernity. Neo-primitivist discourses, as we will see, ignore or
forget their own repeated warnings against the pitfalls of earlier forms of
primitivism, thereby reproducing the very same problems they have
warned us against. Neo-primitivism can thus be characterized as an anti-
primitivist primitivism that simultaneously disavows and reinscribes the
primitive.
Neo-primitivism has become an attractive theoretical option precisely
at a time when ‘primitives,’ defined as belonging to authentic, primor-
dial cultures yet untouched or uncontaminated by modernity, can no
longer be called upon to act as pure forms of otherness. Nevertheless,
the ‘primitive,’ as the ultimate sign of alterity, still seems to serve a useful
theoretical function, though it is now conceptualized as a regulative
ideal rather than as an actuality. Neo-primitivism can thus be seen as a
primitivism without primitives insofar as it forwards a concept of the
primitive so pure that no empirical referent or actual primitive can
contradict or refute it. Though neo-primitivism questions the use of
terms like ‘primitive’ and ‘primitivism,’ it continues to exhibit a deep
primitivist logic that lurks in displaced but related concepts like ‘alterity,’
‘culture,’ and, surprisingly, ‘modernity.’
This book examines how neo-primitivism as an anti-primitivist primi-
tivism without primitives functions as an important theoretical concept
in the writings of postmodernist theorists Jean Baudrillard and Jean-
François Lyotard, the literary and cultural studies scholar Marianna
Torgovnick, the cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, and the cham-
pion of philosophical modernity Jürgen Habermas. I have chosen to
study theorists and thinkers who are normally considered to be anti-
primitivist in order to show the continuing power and persistence of
primitivism even in works that are critical of it. I want to argue that
though greater critical awareness has allowed us to put scare quotes (or
to retain the trace of scare quotes even when we dispense with them)
around the word ‘primitive’ to indicate its invented or culturally con-