ABSTRACT
Historically, arts discourse in the West has tended to characterize the ‘primitive’
in two distinctive frames. The first depicts the primitive as an attractive state,
holding something the West or modernity has lost. Here the primitive is imag-
ined as being in tune with nature and able to serve as a reservoir of essentially
unchanging and noble truths; and because these truths are usually caricatured
as fragile and under constant threat, they are seen to need protection or conser-
vation, an impulse James Clifford has named the ‘salvage paradigm’.1 The
second frame depicts the primitive as a repulsive condition. Here the primitive is
conceived as a more violent, marauding and threatening state, not so much in
need of protecting, conserving or salvaging, as controlling and guarding against.
Furthermore, both the attractive and repulsive depictions of the primitive –
‘what we should emulate or, alternately, what we should fear’2 – are often
entangled, such that a positive assessment of the primitive cannot help but be
coloured by a negative one, and vice versa. The noble savage and the cannibal,
that is, are almost always co-present.
