Paper short abstract:

Amazonian ethnography is often taxed with being romantic in its presentation of noble savages living peacefully untouched by capitalism. This paper proposes that a return to an earlier moment of Amazonian ethnography can offer alternative ways of making good on the romantic critique of modernity.

Paper long abstract:

Amazonian ethnography is often taxed with being romantic in its presentation of noble savages living peacefully untouched by capitalism. This paper proposes that a return to an earlier moment of Amazonian ethnography can offer alternative ways of making good on the romantic critique of modernity. Janet Siskind’s To Hunt in the Morning (1976) takes its title from a famous text by Marx and Engels describing a future communist society having overcome the social division of labour: “communist society (…) makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner” In identifying Sharanahua society with an imagined communist society, Siskind self-consciously repeated a Romantic, critique of modern society from the vantage point of “savage” societies that found one of its first expressions in Rousseau’s Origins of Inequalities (1755). Yet the quote she was using came from Marx and Engels’s German Ideology (1846), the textbook of a particularly positivistic Marxist Structural anthropology that rose to prominence in the 1970s. Against that one-sided positivistic reading of Marx and Engels’s text, Siskind emphasized its Rousseauian origins. This paper will connect these three moments of critique (1976, 1846 and 1755) the role of a self-conscious Romantic portrayal of “the savage” for a critique of modernity – and specifically of the progressive ideology of specific historical moments.