Overview

Examines how four intellectuals with ties to the French social sciences articulated a new primitivist sensibility between 1945 and 1975. We tend to associate primitivism with the nostalgic idealization of origins, often aimed at parts of the world that are viewed as closer to that idealized past than modern post-industrial society. Primitivist impulses still exist in popular culture, whether in paleo diets or returns to foraging, and they can also be seen in intellectual and political circles in debates around the possibility of degrowth. In this book, historian Ryan L. Allen examines primitivism anew through four fascinating figures: Georges Bataille, Henri Lefebvre, Georges Devereux, and Mircea Eliade. In the postwar period, Allen shows, the French social sciences reappraised the primitive and archaic from anthropological, sociological, psychiatric, and religious angles. These four thinkers sought past alternatives to midcentury hypermodernization and capitalist excess. They put forth trenchant critiques of contemporary society and sought in the archaic past a way to imagine a more sustainable future. Adventures in the Archaic rehabilitates these thinkers, showing how their critique of growth and consumerism was nourished by an engagement with primitive cultures as potential sources of cultural and ecological wisdom. As we confront planetary crisis, Allen suggests, there is still much we can learn from these iconoclastic approaches.

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9780226846347

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Reviews

“Written with appealing informality and directness, Adventures in the Archaic interweaves intellectual biography, textual critique, and the history of the social sciences. This lively and original study makes a case for the enduring influence and value of primitivism in contemporary efforts to come to terms with the global crisis engendered by an unthinking ideology of growth.” * Daniel Sherman, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * “As ecological crisis shatters faith in modern progress, Allen reveals how postwar primitivism offers not nostalgia but provocation—the past as a resource for reimagining the future. Beautifully written and deeply original, Adventures in the Archaic demonstrates that looking backward can sometimes be the most radical way forward.” * Kohei Saito, University of Tokyo *

Author Information

Ryan L. Allen is assistant instructional professor at the University of Chicago, where he teaches the history of social and political thought.

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