Prehistories of the future

This volume reconsiders primitivism and modernism, emphasizing an earlier chronology than has been conventionally accepted and showing how ethnographic materials shaped a variety of high and low discourses (ethnology, social theory, gender construction, and classical scholarship, as well as travel photography) at the turn of the century. Acknowledging the complexities, political and otherwise, of the primitivist project, the sixteen essays in this book suggest that primitivism has always been involved contested ideological forces and that the process seems to have generated a set of responses inseparable from what we have come to call modernism.