Prehistories of the Future

Download or read book Prehistories of the Future written by Elazar Barkan and published by Cultural Sitings (Hardcover). This book was released on 1995 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a multi-disciplinary collection which 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 cultural discourses (ethnology, social theory, gender construction, classical scholarship, as well as travel photography) at the turn of the century. Among the topics considered are: the primitivism of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land; the discourse of Victorian sexuality; Emile Durkheim and primitive ritual observance; the manipulation of colonial photographs; the tradition of the barbarous and the noble savage in Western art, literature, and philosophy; Gaugin's images of the South Pacific; the appropriation by Europeans of non-Western bodies, images, and histories; and the relationship between modernist literary techniques and primitivism.