Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives Book

Torgovnick closely reads and contextualizes a list of modern intellectuals and discovers that most of them are basically just masturbating to images of topless natives. Extremely readable despite its academic intentions, she offers a corrective to viewing the primitive as a stage on the path towards modernism or as the personification of Freud's "id" (and therefore something to be suppressed by a colonizing "superego"). Hitting me where I live is what I'll call a blackface tendency, to use the primitive as a way to make myself seem more civilized.

I feel like I might want to read this again some day, which is a pretty strong recommendation. I would also like to see a similar book looking at primitivism in more recent examples of pop culture, literature and scholarship. Like Torgovnick's second chapter, "Taking Tarzan Seriously" I want a book that starts off taking Cameron's Avatar and Gibson's Apocalyptico (or whatever that Mayan film was called) seriously. That looks at cats like Wade Davis the way Torgovnick looks at Tobias Schneebaum. And, yeah, I especially want someone with Torgovnick's chops to get behind the curtain of wizards like John Zerzan.

This book also made me think about librarianship. On the one hand, you want to keep older, thoroughly discredited works if they were of significant importance at the time. On the other hand, maybe something like The Golden Bough should be moved from BL310 .F72 to somewhere in PR... know what I mean?