Definitions of the term primitivism have varied historically in their intellectual usage and inflection across the disciplines. In its broadest sense, primitivism is an interest in or study of societies and cultures that have an ostensibly less developed notion of technological, intellectual, or social progress. Primitive societies defined thus are those that have not progressed to a state of technological advancement and are therefore perceived as antecedent to the industrialized economies of the West. While more recent definitions of primitivism in literature, visual arts, and anthropology have emphasized the temporal relationship between primitive societies and modernity, discourses on "otherness" are discernible in the Plato’s Republic and in Homer’s description of the Cyclops in The Odyssey.
As an intellectual practice or school of thought, primitivism can be broken down into two main strands of inquiry—firstly, that of the empirical study of primitive societies. This approach typified nineteenth-century anthropology, in which empirical study was carried out to chronologically ascribe customs and social structures of "primitive" societies in an evolutionary relationship to Western notions of modernity. Secondly, there is the study of cultural primitivism, which can be traced to Enlightenment philosophical interests in the ideas of nature versus reason seen most notably in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1749) [Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts] and his idea of the noble savage in Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inegalite parmi les hommes (1755) and later in Denis Diderot’s Supplement au voyage au voyage de Bougainville (1772). In French literature, Rene Chateaubriand’s two novellas, Atala, ou les amours des deux sauvages dans le desert (1801) and Rene (1802) continued to explore this post-Enlightenment fascination with non-European cultures.
In the visual arts, earlier aesthetic explorations of the primitive in the work of artists Emil Nolde (1867-1956) and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) in the nineteenth century began to develop in conjunction with new directions in the social sciences in the early twentieth century. In Europe this development was seen most clearly in the break from the disinterested intellectual focus of Victorian anthropology into the newer paradigms of cultural relativism of ethnology and ethnography that had been emerging since Franz Boas wrote The Mind of Primitive Man in 1911 (1983) in which he set out a new model of cultural relativism for the anthropological study of non-Western societies. This approach was taken up and developed by later cultural anthropology in Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929).
The formation in 1926 of the Institut d’Ethnologie in Paris by ethnologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1857-1939), and ethnologist Paul Rivet (1876-1958) heralded a new era of ethnographic enquiry into the concept of the primitive in the social sciences. Large-scale interdisciplinary ethnographic projects such as the Mission Dakar Djibouti 1931-1933 brought together writers, artists, sociologists, and anthropologists to work on new conceptualizations of cultural primitivism. In Europe this development of the term primitivism was simultaneous with the emergence of the modernist movement in art and literature and a new aesthetic engagement with a notion of the primitive that found diverse expressions in painting, as in Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), inspired by his contact with African and Oceanic art in the Musee du Trocadero. This was also found in the modernist avant-garde performances in the dadaist Cabaret Voltaire and in poetry in Blaise Cendrars’s "Prose of the Trans-Siberian" (1913) and Guillaume Apollinaire’s "Zone" (1913).
This renewed literary interest in primitivism was in part motivated by several texts that explored psychology, society, and religion from new intellectual and cultural perspectives: Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, first published in 1890 (1990), the work of Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (2000 [1913]) and later in Civilization and Its Discontents (2005 [1930]). All in some way influenced some of the major works of European literary modernism such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), and D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1926).
Frazer’s study of the primitive roots of religion was the first of its kind to examine religious practices and rituals from a cultural rather than a theological perspective, and this marked a twentieth-century movement away from simple evolutionary binary divisions between notions of "primitive" and "civilized" forms of religious practices to more culturally relativist approaches influenced by the theories of Karl Marx (1818-1883), Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), and Max Weber (1864-1920).
