The Neo-Primitivist Turn : Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (305 pages)
Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1 The Neo-primitivist Turn -- From the 'Savage Slot' to the Critique of Modernity -- Anti-primitivist Primitivism -- Primitivism without Primitives, or Towards Alterity, Culture, and Modernity -- 2 Alterity: Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Marianna Torgovnick -- The Premodern Condition: Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Radical Otherness -- Primitives Are Us: Torgovnick, the Oceanic, and the Feminine -- 3 Culture: Marshall Sahlins -- Sahlins, Captain Cook, and the Apotheosis of Culture -- 'Penseé Sauvage' and Cultural Holism -- Historical Change and Structural Continuity -- How 'Natives' Think: Different Cultures, Different Rationalities -- 4 Modernity: Jürgen Habermas -- 'Followed as if by a shadow': Habermas's Other Discourse of Modernity -- The Linguistification of the Premodern: From Myth to Modernity -- Rationality, Loss, and the Recovery of the Premodern Other -- Conclusion: 'Theorizing always needs a Savage' -- Notes -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.
Providing close readings of the ways in which the premodern or primitive is strategically deployed in contemporary critical writings, Li's interdisciplinary study is a timely and forceful intervention into current debates on the politics and ethics of otherness, the problems of cultural relativism, and the vicissitudes of modernity.
9781442681828
Primitivism. Anthropology. Cultural relativism. Other (Philosophy). Critical theory. Prehistoric peoples.