Reviews for Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives

The average rating for Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-02-22 00:00:00 Isaac Peterson Marianna Torgovnick provocatively undertakes anaylses, utilizing the wide range of the fields of anthropology, psychology, literature, and art, on how the primitive has structured Western culture. Torgovnick maintains that Western society manipulates alternately the terms noble savage or cannibal whenever an image of the primitive is evoked. In other words, Western culture vacillates between emulating the one and fear of the other. Torgovnick analyzes these fears, obsessions, and longings as Western society has developed images and ideas about the primitive through scholarly books, art galleries and museums, adventure novels, photography, travel literature, television programs, and fashion. Torgovnick's views on feminism are pervasive throughout the book. In the introduction, she attacks the cover of Bronislaw Malinoski=s book The Sexual Life of Savages as being male-on-the-top order, although the contents of the book describes social customs in which women of high rank are elevated on platforms over men. (p 6) At times, throughout the book, Torgovnick's feminist stance reads too much into what she is trying to examine. The example above is a case in point. Thoughout her book, Torgovnick asserts her case of the domination and exclusion of women. At times her interpretations come on too strong. According to the author, to study the primitive is thus to enter an exotic world which is also a familiar world. That world is structured by sets of images and ideas that have slipped from their original metaphoric status to control perceptions of primitives images and ideas that [she] call tropes (p 8). The term is appropriate because they encompass images and ideas as well as visual and verbal modes of expression. Examples would be: primitives are like children; primitives are our untamed selves; and primitives are free. These tropes form the base of Primitivist discourse. Torgovnick claims that ". . . the needs of the present undermine the value and nature of the primitive. The primitive does what we ask it to do. It tells us what we want it to tell us" (p 9). There is also a ". . .tendency to perceive primitive peoples or things through the lens of Western myths". Such crossings of Western myths and primitive peoples or institutions create a never-never-land of false identities or homologies. The identities and homologies are false because the two items compared enjoy only a spurious equality (p10-11). By studying the primitive we return to ourselves by how we define the Other. How we define the Other brings us back to ourselves becomes the essence of this book. This is a thought-provoking statement. Torgovnick delves into the lives of various authorities in different fields of study to analyze their work based on their background and some possible reasons as to why they persist in certain matters. She exposes Freud's fascination with the primitive art forms and how much his work was influenced by his being Jewish which in a sense is the Other. Malinowaki's innermost thoughts about his work with the Trobriand Islanders have been revealed through the recent publication of his diary. The turmoil he faced reflects the age in which he lived and the sexual mores of the time. Margaret Mead had her own agenda in what she wrote. She believed that by studying primitive cultures we would be enlightened about our own culture. Looking at the ways adolescent girls behaved in Samoa, we would be able to understand more about adolescence in the West. She claimed certain sexual behavior (homosexuality) was commonplace in Samoa thus the implications were the same for the West. She was very subtle in her representation of this, of course, this was the 1960's and such things were not general topic of the day. Another area that Torgovnick covers is art and the connection to Primivitism during the early 1900's. The Museum of Modern Art, under the direction of William Rubin, produced a showing (and an eventual book) of modern interpretation of the primitive. As I browsed through this book, at times I felt an indignation at the artist's interpretation of native art, whether it be North American Indian, African, and Oceanic. At other times, I was moved by the beauty of certain pieces and what they inspired within me. Torgovnick has selected several excellent representations of art to exemplify the intent of her writing. One of these representations is the art work of Ed Rihacek entitled Gone Primitive. This painting of a white women sitting in the midst of primitive art will evoke many different responses. The response I would love to hear is the response of a Pacific Islander or someone from Africa to this piece. Torgovnick is correct in her statement that the primitive is in our museums and homes, in our closets and jewelry boxes, in our hearts and in our minds. The primitive is everywhere present in modernity and postmodernity, as impetus or subtext, just as modernity or postmodernity forms the subtext of much ethnological writing and thinking. A voyeuristic interest in the primitive surrounds us in what we see and hear, what we learn and read, from the cradle to the grave: it is part of our atmosphere, or the culture we live and breathe. We have no need to Ago primitive because we have already gone primitive (p 246). Torgovnick has used successfully the representations that she feels comfortable with, someone else would use different representations. Her main purpose is to provoke further discussion on the subject and to open up alternative possibilities of attitudes about how we as Western society perceive the Other and thus ourselves.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-26 00:00:00 Paul Wiersma 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?