ABSTRACT
The version of the doctrine of the primitive mind most severely and repeatedly condemned by the anthropological Establishment is associated with the French scholar Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. In his book Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), Lévy-Bruhl ascribed to the members of these ‘lower’ societies what he called, to the outrage of many readers, a ‘prelogical’ mentality. This idea was more fully worked out in La mentalité primitive (1922). Eventually, at the end of his life, Lévy-Bruhl seems to have recanted; but by the time he did so his thesis of prelogicality had achieved lasting notoriety.
