Primitivism

Abstract

Primitivism has a long history. Its beginnings as a distinctive discourse, however, are more widely associated with early-modern encounters between European explorers and the New World. As this early era of exploration developed into a sustained period of global conquest and colonization, primitivist figures began to feature heavily in textual and visual representations of the non-European Other. The term ‘ primitivism’ itself is derived from the Latin primitivus, meaning the first or earliest of its kind. As used or evoked by writers from the sixteenth century and beyond, primitivism broadly denotes humankind in a ‘wild’, ‘savage’, ‘unrefined’ or ‘natural’ state....