Dialectic of Primitivism: Racial Fetishism and Enlightenment in the Shadows of French Empire

Abstract

This dissertation argues that primitivism continues to haunt anthropology because of the discipline’s ambivalent relationship to a core Enlightenment tenet: myth-busting as moral act. Prevailing anthropological critiques of racialization turn on a semiotic ideology that is itself racialized, originating in European dismissals of African religious practices (fetishism). In this moral economy of proper and improper knowing, primitivists and racial fetishists are cast as modern, secular subjects who suffer and subjugate because of their mystification. As a result, primitivists continuously swap places with the “primitives” they dream up. I call this oscillation primitive dialectics. To trace these dialectics, I explore the erotic and spiritual pursuits of self-avowed racial fetishists and primitivists. Drawing on 18 months of research in Paris and supplementary work in Martinique and Benin, I show how a sympathetic yet critical ethnography of these two groups challenges foundational theoretical assumptions of anti-racist anthropology. The first part of the dissertation (“The Sacred in the Sexual”) delves into the lives of white French people who predominantly date Black people. There I show how violent, racist fantasies allow my informants to navigate questions of displaced religious significance under secular, liberal conditions. In interpreting these attempts, I advocate for a historically attuned, anti-racist form of psychoanalytic myth-making. The second part of the dissertation (“The Sexual in the Sacred”) investigates the racially inflected spiritual journeys of white “Primitive Expression” (PE) practitioners. PE is a dance therapy method that draws on structuralism and psychoanalysis to convert “primitive” ecstatic trance rituals into “universal,” secular ritual forms. I argue that PE’s ecstatic effects are achieved not through the successful distillation of universal ritual structures, but rather, by channeling the disavowed sacrality of race in France. Thus, while Part I shows how conceptual armatures derived from primitivism elucidate how white people reproduce anti-Blackness, Part II demonstrates how these very frameworks continue to structure anti-Black violence. Ultimately, I argue that we scholars can strengthen anti-racist critique by taking seriously people we’d prefer to distance ourselves from. Along the way, I make contributions to the anthropology of race, sexuality, France, whiteness, and modernity.