To see ourselves as we need to see us: Ethnography's primative turn in the early cold war years

Abstract

Against a backdrop of calls for a more layered understanding of the dominant societal concerns which influence anthropologists' thinking, and thus the need to address the philosophies and assumptions that for so long misrepresented those characterized as 'primitive' along with others marked out as culturally or biologically inferior, I reflect on the existential crisis that engulfed Euroamerica in the early Cold War years. This was a threat anthropology was well placed to relieve; it did so in part by framing a natural 'primitive man' in opposition to 'civilized' humanity to restore the 'family of man' to psychic security. An image of 'Bushmen' etched by ethnographers rapidly emerged as a centerpiece of anthropological practice. I show how that image is indistinguishable from the fictional version popularized by Laurens van der Post and that both forms of it derive ultimately from the work of Jung. I argue that the image feeds readily into racialist discourse; thus, the time to render it obsolete has long passed.

Keywords:

• primitiveness
• Bushmen
• modernity
• race
• academic-public discourse