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The figure of the primitive circulates globally as a projected other of self-conceivedly modern people, who through it wrestle with their own historical conditions. But what makes representations of the primitive persuasive? This article examines genre, register, and voice features of a highly repetitive sample of travel narratives about Korowai and Kombai people of New Guinea published in high-circulation magazines and newspapers. I suggest that the genre's effectiveness turns on cultivation of iconicity among three event-worlds: a chronotope of narrated travel, a chronotope of author-reader relations, and a mythic chronotope of the civilized and the primitive. In a \"hall of mirrors\" effect, dense networks of intratextual iconicity make broad primitivist stereotypy, narrow travel events, and the textual event of travel writing performance support each other's believability, vividness, and claims to attention.

Culture, 1922traces the intellectual and institutional deployment of the culture concept in England and America in the first half of the twentieth century. With primary attention to how models of culture are created, elaborated upon, transformed, resisted, and ignored, Marc Manganaro works across disciplinary lines to embrace literary, literary critical, and anthropological writing. Tracing two traditions of thinking about culture, as elite products and pursuits and as common and shared systems of values, Manganaro argues that these modernist formulations are not mutually exclusive and have indeed intermingled in complex and interesting ways throughout the development of literary studies and anthropology. Beginning with the important Victorian architects of culture--Matthew Arnold and Edward Tylor--the book follows a number of main figures, schools, and movements up to 1950 such as anthropologist Franz Boas, his disciples Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston, literary modernists T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, functional anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, modernist literary critic I. A. Richards, the New Critics, and Kenneth Burke. The main focus here, however, is upon three works published in 1922, the watershed year of Modernism--Eliot'sThe Waste Land, Malinowski'sArgonauts of the Western Pacific, and Joyce'sUlysses. Manganaro reads these masterworks and the history of their reception as efforts toward defining culture. This is a wide-ranging and ambitious study about an ambiguous and complex concept as it moves within and between disciplines.

The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic \"life,\" making human sensations--especially pleasure and pain--the sources and signs of that value. Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of nineteenth-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neoclassical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises. The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.

Hans Naumann is known primarily for the term gesunkenes Kulturgut, to such a degree that he is inseparable from the term. It is rarely translated but just left in the German original. It was, however, his conception of primitive communal culture that caused the harshest reaction to his work, evoked negative criticism during Nazism, and was condemned to the end of the twentieth century. Hans Naumann assumed a theoretical stance in the 1920s that thrust him into a maelstrom of controversy he could not possibly have anticipated, the final results of which affected his reputation and cost him his academic position and nearly his life. This paper will survey much of that scholarship for the English-speaking world; it will probe the contents of the two works in which his primary concepts are presented; there will be detail on Naumann's excursions into Nazism—based to some degree on information found in a 2001 “biographical novel” by his son Andreas Naumann, which has not yet been assessed by Naumann scholars. Hans Naumann's work will be treated by shifting our gaze away from “sunken goods” and toward “primitive communal culture,” suggesting why such a reassessment is important today. Finally, in order to contribute to our understanding of the role Hans Naumann has played in folklore, translations into English of the two works where his concepts appear will be presented.

The original sin of anthropology was to divide the world into civilized and savage. The social systems of all those other peoples supposedly rested upon a foundation of blood relationships. Anthropologists therefore became at once the experts on the primitive and on kinship. In the 1970s Western kinship systems began to undergo radical change. Simultaneously, the old orthodoxies about kinship crumbled in anthropology. Young ethnographers generally lost interest in the topic. Kinship systems have nevertheless not gone away, out there in the world. But to understand them we must first abandon the opposition between the modern and the traditional, the West and the Rest. /// Le péché originel de l'anthropologie fut de diviser le monde en \"civilisé\" et \"sauvage\", en partant du principe que les systèmes sociaux des autres reposaient sur des fondations constituées par les liens du sang. Les anthropologues devinrent ainsi à la fois les experts des primitifs et de la parenté. Dans les années 1970, les systèmes de parenté occidentaux ont amorcé des changements radicaux. Dans le même temps, les vieilles orthodoxies anthropologiques relatives à la parenté ont commencé à s'effriter, et les jeunes ethnographes se sont pour la plupart désintéressés du sujet. Les systèmes de parenté n'ont pas disparu pour autant dans le monde mais il faut, pour les comprendre, renoncer d'abord à l'opposition entre modernité et tradition, entre l'Occident et le reste du monde.

This paper attempts to clarify the emergence of Matsumoto Nobuhiro as an ethnologist in the period 1919-23. Matsumoto Nobuhiro (1897-1981) was an ethnologist who is known as a pioneer in Southeast Asian studies and the Japanese mythology in Japan. Previous researches have already pointed out the influence of Yanagita Kunio and of the French School of Sociology on Matsumoto's academic work from the late 1920s. However, they did not examine Matsumoto's research in the early 1920s when Matsumoto started studying ethnology. The clarification of the formation of Matsumoto's ethnology in this period can contribute to the understanding of emergence and formation of ethnology in Japan. Based on the analysis of Matsumoto's writing in the period 1919-23, this paper explains that Matsumoto became ethnologist because he joined the discussion on the human origins under influence of Evolutionism. It argues that he researched primitive culture of various peoples in order to clarify the origins of the Japanese and Chinese culture. Further, the paper shows that Matsumoto became ethnologist due to studying Western ethnology under the guidance of ethno-psychologist Kawai Teiichi and folklorist Yanagita Kunio, and it mentions also influence of Matsumoto's teachers of Chinese history on the formation of Matsumoto's ethnology. Therefore, the paper demonstrates that the Japanese ethnology emerged from the discussion on the human origins under influence of Evolutionism by importing Western ethnological theories in close relation with the Japanese folklore studies and history.

The present article discusses historical, conceptual, and methodological issues associated with the cross-cultural measurement of personality. It documents the extensive debate and discussion that has emerged from the juxtaposition of the trait-situation, universalism-relativism, quantitative-qualitative, and anthropology-psychology polarities in the past decade. Following a discussion of these polarities, the present article concludes that the contending (and contentious) positions should be replaced by collaborative disciplinary research efforts that are open to the possibility of both cultural variations and universals in human behavior. Fundamental similarities in behavior may exist across cultural boundaries because of bio-evolutionary, natural language descriptors and similar life-activity and socialization contexts. Major differences may exist for the very same reasons. At this point in time, it is more fruitful to have inquiry guided by questions rather than efforts to affirm positions. Neither side in the bitter debates that have arisen has provided sufficient evidence to warrant their unconditional acceptance.

Roy Rappaport argues that religion is central to the continuing evolution of life, although it has been been displaced from its original position of intellectual authority by the rise of modern science. His book, which could be construed as in some degree religious as well as about religion, insists that religion can and must be reconciled with science. Combining adaptive and cognitive approaches to the study of humankind, he mounts a comprehensive analysis of religion's evolutionary significance, seeing it as co-extensive with the invention of language and hence of culture as we know it. At the same time he assembles the fullest study yet of religion's main component, ritual, which constructs the conceptions which we take to be religious and has been central in the making of humanity's adaptation. The text amounts to a manual for effective ritual, illustrated by examples drawn from anthropology, history, philosophy, comparative religion, and elsewhere.

\"Good fish get dull but sex is always fun.\" So say the Mehinaku people of Brazil. But Thomas Gregor shows that sex brings a supreme ambiguity to the villagers' lives. In their elaborate rituals—especially those practiced by the men in their secret societies—the Mehinaku give expression to a system of symbols reminiscent of psychosexual neuroses identified by Freud: castration anxiety, Oedipal conflict, fantasies of loss of strength through sex, and a host of others. \"If we look carefully,\" writes Gregor, \"we will see reflections of our own sexual nature in the life ways of an Amazonian people.\" The book is illustrated with Mehinaku drawings of ritual texts and myths, as well as with photographs of the villagers taking part in both everyday and ceremonial activities.

Fragments of ancient belief mingle with folklore and Christian dogma until the original tenets are lost in the myths and psychologies of the intervening years. Hilda Ellis Davidson illustrates how pagan beliefs have been represented and misinterpreted by the Christian tradition, and throws light on the nature of pre-Christian beliefs and how they have been preserved. The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe stresses both the possibilities and the difficulties of investigating the lost religious beliefs of Northern Europe.