Primitivism

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

The word primitive first appeared in written form in the 15th century to represent “original” or [Page 728]“ancestor,” and it was primarily used in relation to animals and only occasionally to humans. In modern times, primitivism has become dichotomous in nature, normally used in juxtaposition between natural and modern urban industrial or commercial technological culture. Primitivism is most often understood as largely a post-Enlightenment phenomenon developed in reaction to the rationalism of the European Enlightenment. Jane Kingsley describes it as a belief that nature provides more healthy models of human behavior than does civilization, or those societies viewed as tainted or corrupted by societal, industrial, and technological development. The most popular expression of primitivism may be best exemplified by the mythology of the “noble savage.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his oft-quoted introduction to his book Émile, or On Education (“Émile ou de l'éeducation”), epitomized this confidence in nature as the purest force, describing nature as inherently good and human technology and society intrinsically flawed. The use of the term spread to a number of emerging disciplines in the 18th century and took on meanings ranging from “simple” to “pure and original.” As a scientific idea, it first appeared as a concept informing inquiry by anthropologists in the 1860s and 1870s. In 18th- and 19th-century European art history primitive was used to describe all artists and art created before the Renaissance, and by the 1920s it was widely applied to “tribal art” originating from colonized nations.

Since these beginnings, primitivism has at times been transformed from a conceptual device for exploring past and contemporary societies and changes into a variety of subcultural movements united in opposition to modern contemporary urbanized societies. As Christian Klesse and others have observed, primitivism in its modern form is popularly constructed as the antithesis of industrial technologically complex Western societies. Modern primitivism—for example, a subculture that originated in California in the 1970s—idealized the notion of “going primitive” to escape what proponents viewed as a corrupt industrial and technological North American society.

Primitivism as a theoretical concept has evolved into notions of neoprimitivism, which struggles with primitivists' absolutist notions of modern society, and recent attempts to reframe it as a virtue of European recognition and valuing of the “other.” Some Indigenous scholars, while often sharply critical of primitivism as a theoretical concept, have begun to reframe primitivism as a misunderstanding of symbiotic integration or coevolutionary development of nature and humankind.

In case study research primitivism is commonly and frequently utilized as a thematic vehicle in the interpretation and reinterpretation of cultures, ideas, and traditions and for inquiring into the strategies for and forms of cultural representation.

Application

Two exemplars of primitivism in case study research are Leah Dilworth's study Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past and Roger Sandall's book The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Stories.

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