The reanimation of the primitive: Fin-de-siecle ethnographic discourse in western Europe.

A sepulchral air lingers about the corpus of Victorian anthropology, for it was, as its authors readily and often attested, largely the record of dead or dying peoples. Yet this was not unique to late nineteenth-century anthropology. At a fundamental level, such a sensibility has characterized popular anthropological discourse, as well as the orientation of academic anthropology, well into the twentieth century. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques (1955) is perhaps the best-known and most eloquent expression of a seemingly undying Western nostalgia for the ever-dying primitive. Together with the notion of an eventual transition from primitive to civilized, the conceptualization of the ethnographic subject as a living relic of the human past are two of the grand archetypes of both anthropological thinking and Western culture. Recognition of this profound continuity, however, should not prevent us from registering near-term alterations in the form of ethnographic discourse. This article will describe one such subtlety: a transition in the models used by Western European scholars to argue about the ethnographic primitive. This change was most concentrated in that region of discourse dealing with, to use a nineteenth-century idiom, the “moral sciences”, rather than those tendencies in the sciences of man towards biological reductions and medical models. It is in this modality — as description and analysis of customs, beliefs, and institutions — that I argue for a transition in the ethnographic conception of the primitive. Simply put, in the years around 1900, a model constituting the ethnographic primitive as inert, generative of ghosts, and historically distant, was displaced by a model of the primitive as vital, contemporary, proximate, and subject to synchronic social analysis. To the extent that this may be understood as ethnography’s rejection of a characteristic variety of nineteenth-century historicism, I hope to show the participation of ethnographic discourse, and particularly the category of the primitive, in the cultural modernity of the last century. There is no more ready answer to the question “What is cultural modernity?” than the response, “The rejection of history”. “Modern architecture, modern music, modern philosophy, modern science”, wrote Carl Schorske in his cultural history of turn-of-the-century Vienna, “ — all these define themselves not out of the past, indeed scarcely against the past but in independence of the past”. For ethnographers such as Arnold van Gennep, the “rejection of history” translated into