Encountering Others, Imagining Modernity: Primitivism in German Ethnology, Art, and Theory.

Abstract

This study incorporates insights from postcolonial theory and new materialism to tell a networked history of primitivism in the German-speaking world from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century. At the fin de siècle, primitivism transformed modern art through a new interest in societies coded as non-Western and non-modern, principally from areas of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Through an interdisciplinary approach this dissertation examines primitivist ideas not only in the visual arts but in anthropology and critical theory; it argues that primitivism has played a fundamentally constitutive role in producing a particular image of modernity as a time of historical crisis defined by autonomy, alienation, and longing for lost authenticity and community. Critics such as Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour have argued that this notion is simply a myth of the moderns; yet the narrative persists. Through a critique of colonial discourse analysis and an examination of contemporary theory of primitivism, this study contends that primitivism has shaped a popular critique of modernity—the set of perceptions that modernization, capitalism, rationalization, secularization, urbanization and bureaucratization have led to a defining feature of modernity, the “disenchantment of the world.” Technological and social change could have been experienced differently—that they were not is a product of imperialism and primitivism. Analyzing Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this study discerns the imperialist roots of an ethnocentric discourse of modernity. At the same time, however, this primitivist discourse was challenged from within, in the form of primitivist works that theoretically and aesthetically called the discourse and its categories into question. This type of aporetic primitivism characterizes the ethnology of Adolf Bastian and the artwork of the German Expressionists the Brücke (especially E.L. Kirchner). Contrary to Johannes Fabian’s diagnosis of anthropology’s denial of coevalness, Bastian’s theorization of Kulturvölker / Naturvölker and his quasi-modernist writing challenge the allochronism of anthropological primitivism, undermining the subject position of modernity. Kirchner’s art, contrary to Jill Lloyd and Reinhold Heller, is not a naïve romantic primitivism; rather, through a vital materialism, Kirchner dismantles the distinctions between modern and primitive, nature and society, human and non-human.