Primitive America

Primitive America

Author: Paul Smith

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 9780816628278

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One of the most confounding aspects of American society—the one that perhaps most frequently perplexes observers both domestic and foreign—is the vast contradiction between what anthropologists might term the “hot” and “cold” elements in the culture. The hot encompasses the dynamic and progressive aspects of a society dedicated to growth and productivity, marked by mobility, innovation, and optimism. In contrast, the cold embodies rigid social forms and archaic beliefs, fundamentalisms of all kinds, racism and xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, cultural atavism, and ignorance—in short, the primitive. For cultural critic Paul Smith, the tension between progressive and primitive is a constitutive condition of American history and culture. In Primitive America, Smith contemplates this primary contradiction as it has played out in the years since 9/11. Indeed, he writes, much of what has happened since—events that have seemed to many to be novel and egregious—can be explained by this foundational dialectic. More radically still, Primitive America attests that this underlying stress is driven by America's unquestioned devotion to the elemental propositions and processes of capitalism. This devotion, Smith argues, has become America's quintessential characteristic, and he begins this book by elaborating on the idea of the primitive in America—its specific history of capital accumulation, commodity fetishism, and cultural narcissism. Smith goes on to track the symptoms of the primitive that have arisen in the aftermath of 9/11 and the commencement of the “Long War” against “violent extremists”: the nature of American imperialism, the status of the U.S. Constitution, the militarization of America's economy and culture, and the Bush administration's disregard for human rights. An urgent and important engagement with current American policies and practices, Primitive America is, at the same time, an incisive critique of the ideology that fuels the ethos of America's capitalist culture. Paul Smith is professor of cultural studies at George Mason University and the author of numerous books, including Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minnesota, 1993).


American Primitive

American Primitive

Author: Mary Oliver

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Published: 1983-04-30

Total Pages: 88

ISBN-13: 9780316650045

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Her most acclaimed volume of poetry, American Primitive contains fifty visionary poems about nature, the humanity in love, and the wilderness of America, both within our bodies and outside. "American Primitive enchants me with the purity of its lyric voice, the loving freshness of its perceptions, and the singular glow of a spiritual life brightening the pages." -- Stanley Kunitz "These poems are natural growths out of a loam of perception and feeling, and instinctive skill with language makes them seem effortless. Reading them is a sensual delight." -- May Swenson


American Primitive

American Primitive

Author: Roger Ricco

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

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Contains photos of over 400 pieces of American primitive sculpture.


The American Quest for the Primitive Church

The American Quest for the Primitive Church

Author: Richard Thomas Hughes

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780252060298

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The dream of restoring primitive Christianity lies close to the core of the identity of some American denominations---Churches of Christ, Latter-day Saints, some Mennonites, and a variety of Holiness and Pentecostal denominations. But how can a return to ancient Christianity be sustained in a world increasingly driven by modernization? What meaning might such a vision have in the modern world? Twelve distinguished scholars explore these and related questions in this provocative book.


Creation Myths of Primitive America In relation to the Religious History and Mental Development of Mankind

Creation Myths of Primitive America In relation to the Religious History and Mental Development of Mankind

Author: Jeremiah Curtin

Publisher: Library of Alexandria

Published: 2020-09-28

Total Pages: 597

ISBN-13: 1465604359

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ÊThe American creation myths, as far as we know them, form simply a series of accounts of the conflicts, happenings, and various methods by which the first world was changed into the world now existing. This change was effected in various ways. In the myths of certain tribes or nations, it is mainly by struggles between hostile personages. One god of great power and character overcomes a vast number of opponents, and changes each into some beast, bird, plant, or insect; but always the resultant beast or other creature corresponds in some power of mind or in some leading quality of character with the god from whose position it has fallen. In certain single cases opponents are closely matched, they are nearly equal in combat; the struggle between them is long, uncertain, and difficult. At last, when one side is triumphant, the victor says, ÒHereafter you will be nothing but a ÑÑÓ; and he tells what the vanquished is to be. But at this point the vanquished turns on the victor and sends his retort like a Parthian arrow, ÒYou will be nothing but a ÑÑÓ; and he declares what his enemy is to be. The metamorphosis takes place immediately on both sides, and each departs in the form which the enemy seemed to impose, but which really belonged to him. There are cases in which the hero transforms numerous and mighty enemies indirectly through a special wish which he possesses. For example, a certain myth hero brings it about that a large company of the first people are invited to a feast, and while all are eating with great relish he slips out unnoted, walks around the house, and utters, as he goes, the magic formula: ÒI wish the walls of this house to be flint, the roof also.Ó Next moment the whole house is flint-walled, the roof is flint also. After that he says, ÒI wish this house to be red-hot.Ó It is red-hot immediately. His enemies inside are in a dreadful predicament; they rush about wildly, they roar, they look for an opening; there is none, they see no escape, they find no issue. Their heads burst from heat. Out of one head springs an owl, and flies away through the smoke-hole; out of another a buzzard, which escapes through the same place; out of the third comes a hawk, which follows the other two; out of a fourth some other bird. Thus the action continues till every head in the flint house bursts open and lets out its occupant. All fly away, and thus the whole company is metamorphosed. Each turns into that which his qualities called for, which his nature demanded; he becomes outwardly and visibly that which before he had been internally and in secret.


The Filipino Primitive

The Filipino Primitive

Author: Sarita Echavez See

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2017-11-14

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1479842664

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Nowhere can we appreciate so easily the intertwined nature of the triple forces of knowledge accumulation--capital, colonial, and racial--than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. Sarita See maintains that it is this material collection of artifacts associated with the racial, colonial primitive that forms the foundation of American knowledge production. The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx's concept of "primitive accumulation," usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation. Taking us through the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, also in Michigan, See reveals these exhibits as both allegory and real case of the primitive accumulation subtending imperial American knowledge, just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the development of an American accumulative drive toward power and knowledge, we can appreciate the value of Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Stephanie Syjuco, and Ma-Yi Theater Company who have created incisive parodies of an accumulative epistemology, even as they articulate powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.


John Wesley in America

John Wesley in America

Author: Geordan Hammond

Publisher:

Published: 2014-04

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0198701608

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This is the first book length study of John Wesley's period as a missionary in colonial Georgia. The mission was a laboratory for implementing his views of primitive Christianity. The ideal of restoring the doctrine, discipline, and practice of the early church in the Georgia wilderness was a prime motivation for Wesley's missionary activity.


Primitive

Primitive

Author: Janice N. Harrington

Publisher: BOA Editions

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781942683209

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Biographical poems on artist Horace H. Pippin, who left an invaluable record of African American life during World War I.


Dark Vanishings

Dark Vanishings

Author: Patrick Brantlinger

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2014-01-15

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0801468671

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Patrick Brantlinger here examines the commonly held nineteenth-century view that all "primitive" or "savage" races around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction. Warlike propensities and presumed cannibalism were regarded as simultaneously noble and suicidal, accelerants of the downfall of other races after contact with white civilization. Brantlinger finds at the heart of this belief the stereotype of the self-exterminating savage, or the view that "savagery" is a sufficient explanation for the ultimate disappearance of "savages" from the grand theater of world history.Humanitarians, according to Brantlinger, saw the problem in the same terms of inevitability (or doom) as did scientists such as Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley as well as propagandists for empire such as Charles Wentworth Dilke and James Anthony Froude. Brantlinger analyzes the Irish Famine in the context of ideas and theories about primitive races in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. He shows that by the end of the nineteenth century, especially through the influence of the eugenics movement, extinction discourse was ironically applied to "the great white race" in various apocalyptic formulations. With the rise of fascism and Nazism, and with the gradual renewal of aboriginal populations in some parts of the world, by the 1930s the stereotypic idea of "fatal impact" began to unravel, as did also various more general forms of race-based thinking and of social Darwinism.