ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to bring to bear upon civilization and barbarity the ineradicable insistence of the present moment, and begin with the current mood of disenchantment with civilization. Despairing of civilization, hankering after times past or utopias present among simpler peoples, the cult of nature, of the primitive and of the pre-colonial idyll, are not of course the preserve of western cultural studies academics or non-governmental organizations today. The chapter asserts that the discourses on the barbarian within and the barbarian without are isomorphous, because both share a pessimistic anthropology beyond history, an anthropology which views human collectivities as governed by a natural history rather than one seriously involving human agency, by fatalism rather than historicity. There is of course cardinal principle for the mental culture of modernity, namely, historicism. This implied the valorization of history by associating substantive notions of progressive and elevating change to the passage of time.
