Marianna Torgovnick - Gone Primitive. The Univ. of Chicago Press. 1990

Chicago and London

[인용]

Part 1. Going Primitive

(정리)

'Primitive'(원시적인, 원시인, 원시성 등)라는 말이 의미하는 바를 추적하고 있는 이 파트는 1980년대 정도에 이 문제를 어떻게 생각하고 있는지를 잘 포착하고 있다는 점에서 의의가 있다. 나의 주된 관심사는 '문명과 야만(원시)의 이분법'의 허구성을 포착하는 것인데, 필자는 '원시'라는 용어가 유럽과 미국 사회의 상상에서 나온 허구라는 주장(20)에는 동조하고 있지 않지만, 현존하는 원시적인 사회에 대한 그 동안의 설명들이 갖는 문제점들을 지적해 나가고 있다( I would not at all deny the reality and multiplicity of the societies we have tended to call primitive, but would deny that such societies have been, or could be, represented and conceived with disinterested objectivity and accuracy.) 특히 포스트모던적 경향과 함께 '원시적인 것'은 유럽과 미국 사회에 적대적인 대상이 아니라 하나의 유행으로 자리하고 있지만, 그 이면에는 예전의 식민주의자들이 가졌던 인종주의적인 측면이 내재해 있을 수 있는 위험성도 동시에 지적한다.

말리노프스키, 프로이트, 융, 콘래드 등의 사고에도 당대의 식민주의자들, 그 대표적 인물이 스탠리일 것인데, 이 투사하는 아프리카인들의 상이 은연중에 스며들어 있다고 주장하는 부분이나, '식인의 풍습'에 대한 지적도 중요하다. 특히 다음 부분들을 주의깊게 볼 필요가 있을 듯하다.

8) To study the primitive is thus to enter an exotic world which is also a familiar world. That world is structured by sets of images and ideas that have slipped from their original metaphoric status to control perceptions of primitives - images and ideas that I call tropes. Primitives are like children, the tropes say. Primitives are our untamed selves, our id forces - libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous. Primitives are mystics, in tune with nature, part of its harmonies. Primitives are free. Primitives exist at the "lowest cultural levels" ; we occupy the "highest," in the metaphors of stratification and hierarchy commonly used by Manilnowski and others like him. The ensemble of these tropes - however miscellaneous and contradictory - forms the basic grammar and vocabulary of what I call primitivist discourse, a discourse fundamental to the Western sense of self and Other.

19) When we say "primitive" today, we generally designate certain social formations wihin relatively isolated areas of Africa, Oceania, South America, and other areas of the world--social formations characterized perhaps most clearly by the absence of tools and technology widely available elsewhere. Such societies have been the traditional objects of ethnographic research and have thus been represented in the West according to available ethnographic categories.

- It required readjustments in thought that stripped away decades, even centuries, of usage which saw primitive societies not as various and complete in themselves but as developing toward Western norms.

(22) cannibalism

Africans and other groups have often been imaged as cannibals, and yet all scholarly research suggest that cannibalism was never a uniform (and never a simple) practice in Africa or anywhere else, and that groups which eat human flesh and groups averse to eating humans have existed side by side, in a patchwork quilt, whereever the practice has been identified.

1. Defining the Primitive / Reimagining Modernity

Imagining Them

3) dichotomies - noble savages or cannibals

루소 - 인간 불평등 기원론 (noble savages)

몽테뉴 - Of the Cannibals [사람을 먹는 것이 서양의 고문보다 더 야만적이지 않다.] (249)

4) the civilized and the primitive

5) Manilnowski

7) Malinowski, James Frazer, Freud 이 그룹의 공통점

- they sought the universal truth about human nature and conceived of primitive societies as the testing ground, the laboratory, the key to that universal truth.

8) 'primitive'라는 용어가 viable(실행력이 있는? 실행가능한)한가?

8) evolutionist premises

Freud  - the primitive represents "a necessary stage of development through which every race has passed." (Totem and Taboo, 29)

[이 부분 중요하다. 논문에 이용할만하다.]

- Malinowski 말리노프스키 - "the primitive mind" is "the human mind as we find it universally"; to study it is to study human nature writ large (Sex, Culture, and Myth, 126)

- To study the primitive is thus to enter an exotic world which is also a familiar world. That world is structured by sets of images and ideas that have slipped from their original metaphoric status to control perceptions of primitives - images and ideas that I call tropes. Primitives are like children, the tropes say. Primitives are our untamed selves, our id forces - libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous. Primitives are mystics, in tune with nature, part of its harmonies. Primitives are free. Primitives exist at the "lowest cultural levels" ; we occupy the "highest," in the metaphors of stratification and hierarchy commonly used by Manilnowski and others like him. The ensemble of these tropes - however miscellaneous and contradictory - forms the basic grammar and vocabulary of what I call primitivist discourse, a discourse fundamental to the Western sense of self and Other.

9) The real secret of the primitive in this century; the primitive can be--has been, will be[?]--whatever Euro-Americans want it to be.

10) Africa is "dark" and dangerous; its core, center, or heart count most, even though Stanley journeyed also in the East and West.

- 아프리카의 최고의 것은 백인의 것.

11) Jung - Africa is the quintessential locus of the primitive: it tells a tale of "the eternal beginning" and gives "the most intense sentiment of returning to the land of my youth"; it is immemorially known.

Imagining Us

13) But ideas about primitive societies and, very important, the persistent Western tendency to process the third world as "primitive" have made things happen in the political world. (예 아프리카의 분할. 에티오피아 침공, 나치의 유대인과 집시 학살)

17) Our sense of the primitive impinges on our sense of our selves--it is bound up with the selves who act in the "real," political world. Freud's map of the psyche palced the ego at point that mediates between the cilvilizing super-ego and the "primitive" libido (or id).

[정신분석에 대한 필자의 언급은 부정확한 측면도 있지만, 크게 보면 맞는 말이기도 하다.]

18) These Others are processed, like primitives, through a variety of tropes which see them as a threatening horde, a faceless mass, promiscuous, breeding, inferior--at the farthest edge, exterminable.

Defining the "Primitive"--or Trying To

19) When we say "primitive" today, we generally designate certain social formations wihin relatively isolated areas of Africa, Oceania, South America, and other areas of the world--social formations characterized perhaps most clearly by the absence of tools and technology widely available elsewhere. Such societies have been the traditional objects of ethnographic research and have thus been represented in the West according to available ethnographic categories.

- It required readjustments in thought that stripped away decades, even centuries, of usage which saw primitive societies not as various and complete in themselves but as developing toward Western norms.

20) primitive society가 존재하지 않고, 결코 존재하지 않았으며, simply a figment of the Euro-American imagination. (이런 견해)

- I would not at all deny the reality and multiplicity of the societies we have tended to call primitive, but would deny that such societies have been, or could be, represented and conceived with disinterested objectivity and accuracy.

21) the condition of societies before the emergence of the modern state.

- Such societies clearly once occupied much of the earth; today they survive in fewer and more isolated spaces and are often marked by contact, however minimal, with modern (urban and industrial) cultures.

22) Our culture's generalized notion of the primitive is by nature and in effect inexact or composite: it conforms to no single social or geographical entity and, indeed, habitually and sometimes willfully confuses the attributes of different societies.

- cannibalism

Africans and other groups have often been imaged as cannibals, and yet all scholarly research suggest that cannibalism was never a uniform (and never a simple) practice in Africa or anywhere else, and that groups which eat human flesh and groups averse to eating humans have existed side by side, in a patchwork quilt, whereever the practice has been identified.

Travellin with Odysseus and Stanley

24) Polyphemus(Cyclops) - "savage"의 원형.

- They are not like "us" in any of the categories that ethnography would later employ. The clincher[결정적인 요인], for Odysseus, is their lack of zeal in developing colonies.

26) 타잔의 저자인 Burroughs 스탠리의 책을 많이 읽음.

- Freud read Stanley avidly in his youth, writers like Gide, Conrad, and Leiris modeled their writing about Africa on Stanley's books both generically (using the journal of diary form) and conceptually.

32) Stanley _ How I Found L.

- The "white stranger about penetrating Africa," says Stanley, "begins to learn the necessity of admitting that negroes are men, like himself, though of a different colour; that they have passions and prejudices, likes and dislikes, sympathies and antipathies, tastes and feelings, in common with all human nature" (9). Even more, Stanley proclaims himself "prepared to admit any black man, possessing the attributes of true manhood, or any good qualites, to my friendship, even to a brotherhood with myself; and to respect him for such, as much as if he were of my own colour and race"(9).

[스탠리의 공언과 실제의 차이에 주목. 리빙스턴의 편지 등을 담은 박스를 운반하는 흑인이 강물 깊은 웅덩이에 빠져들어 박스를 손실할 위험이 생기자, 그의 머리에 총을 겨누며 박스를 분실하면 총으로 쏘아죽이겠다고 하는 것. (33)

자신들을 노려보는 흑인 부족의 일원을 채찍으로 때린 것]

34) 20세기 말의 상황

a tale of the Western will to mastery at any cost; a tale of how the desire to approach the Other with open minds and good will gives way to something that betrays even the best intentions.

Gone Primitive

37) In vogue today as in the teens and twenties, ideas about the primitive really different in kind from Stanley's ideas, or the ideas of the twenties, or do they just tell us what we want to hear now?

Living in the Urban Jungle

38) The primitive has in someways always been a willful invention by the West, but the West was once much more convinced of the illusion of Otherness it created. Now everything is mixed up, and the Other controlls some of the elements in the mix.

39) the village workshops consult the "latest coffee-table books and auction catalogues of African art" in order to keep up with shifting Western tastes and vogues.

41) 현재 모든 것이 뒤섞인 포스트모던의 상태는 초기의 식민주의자들이 비서구를 식민화할 때와 같은 심각한 문제에 대한 책임을 회피하는 경향이 있다.

(주 47) The most fully documented instances of cannibalism as a social institution come from New Guinea. . . .

But it has not prevented the invocations of the African cooking pot in various popular representations of Africa (including the Tarzan novels). Most scholars agree that cannibalism existed in parts of Africa, but spottily, with neighboring groups often widely diverse in attudes toward the practice (the same diversity is true in other regions of the world.)