Reflecting on the essential conditions of social existence, the philosophers of the European Enlightenment found it helpful to imagine what human life might have been like without government or society. They thought that before people came together to...

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PREANIMISM. In the years around 1900, the scholarly debate about the origins and evolution of religion was still in large measure dominated by the theories put forward by E. B. Tylor thirty years previously, notably in his Primitive Culture (London,...

In older anthropology texts and discussions, a primitive culture is one that lacks major signs of economic development or modernity. For instance, it might lack a written language or advanced technology and have a limited and isolated population. The...

Oksiloff, Assenka. Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 227 pp. $65.00 hardcover. If the cinema and anthropology had an uneasy relationship in turn-of-the-century England and the United States, as Alison Griffiths has recently shown, the...

Byline: Pius K. Kamau No. I can't see myself with an earring gracing an earlobe. But I no longer consider the wearing of earrings by my male friends weird. Which is interesting because just a few short years ago I shuddered when...