The idea of a primitive mentality is closely associated with the French philosopher †Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) who attempted to delineate its attributes (1910, 1922, 1927). Lévy-Bruhl remarked that he became interested in the possibility that modes of thought are not everywhere the same when a colleague at the École Normal Supérieure sent him a translation of the works of ancient Chinese philosophers, a text which he found quite incomprehensible. At the same time Lévy-Bruhl was not convinced by the English anthropologists †Frazer and †Tylor who assumed that the intellect of people everywhere was the same except that some people, ‘primitives’, were in varying degrees ignorant, and that this accounted for any apparent differences.
A primitive mentality is one side of a simple dualism of which the other side is European (‘civilized’) mentality. To this extent Lévy-Bruhl was working in a manner common enough at the time, when short cuts were being taken through history by attempting to characterize the development of human society in terms of a movement between dualities such as †mechanical and †organic social solidarity (†Durkheim), †status-based and †contract-based societies (†Maine), †Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (†Tönnies). However, Lévy-Bruhl was less successful in describing his duality of mentalities in positive terms. Primitive mentality was defined negatively, in terms of an absence (rather than the presence) of attributes. Thus, Lévy-Bruhl describes the first characteristic of primitive mentality as ‘mystical’, but this simply means that primitive people do not make the distinction between the natural and supernatural which is typical of modern thought. The second distingishing feature is that it is pre-logical. But, again, Lévy-Bruhl can only explain this quality by saying that the primitive mentality ‘does not tie itself down as our thought does, to the avoidance of contradiction’. Instead a primitive mentality obeys something he called ‘the law of participation’, which means that thoughts can be joined by connections which having nothing in common with those of our logic. These qualities were inferred by Lévy-Bruhl from ethnographic reports such as, for example, that the Bororo of the Amazon claim to be red parrots, or that among the Asante of Ghana if a husband learns that another man has dreamed of sexual intercourse with his wife then he will sue the dreamer for adultery.
Although Lévy-Bruhl consistently viewed the analysis of primitive mentality as a sociological rather than a psychological task, and emphasized the collective nature of the mentality, deploying such Durkheimian notions as †‘collective representations’, he did not, unlike Durkheim, relate cognitive structures to social structures. Mentalities, whether primitive or civilized, were autonomous. Moreover, in Lévy-Bruhl’s sense of collective, there can be no room for deviants. The idea of a mentality identifies a mode of thought which is absolutely pervasive: that a Bororo might not be a red parrot is therefore inconceivable to the Bororo mind.
The word ‘mentality’ is also used in a rather weaker sense. Just as a society may have a characteristic style of architecture, of music, of cuisine, and the like, so it is supposed to have a style of thought, a usage which is close to a word such as ‘culture’. It is this sense of mentality which French social historians such as Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch and members of the †Annales school intend. It refers to the taken for granted in a particular society, the practical knowledge of its members, rather than to explicit systems of belief and doctrine. But what is being documented, and sometimes invoked to explain a course of events, may merely reflect the different interests of the people of the societies being investigated, and it is not at all obvious that the introduction of a word such as ‘mentality’ does more than contribute to a distancing of the people from ourselves by importing a suggestion of an alternative mode of thought.
Attempts since Lévy-Bruhl to identify the attributes of a primitive mentality have proved to be equally unsuccessful. For example, Hallpike (1979), like Lévy-Bruhl, took as his point of departure ethnographic reports of concepts of cause, space, *time, *number, self, and then related these to †Piaget’s theories of developmental pyschology; theories which, as Hallpike notes, were not available to Lévy-Bruhl. Hallpike concluded that the cognitive abilities of six-year-old children, as described by Piaget, are sufficient to understand what people in a primitive society know about, for example, shadows, and therefore probably also describe the attributes of a primitive mentality. However, the validity of Piaget’s theories have been questioned within psychology, and research by comparative psychologists among the people whose cultures provide the evidence for Hallpike’s account of primitive mentality indicate that this approach is mistaken (Shweder 1982).
As against the notion of a distinct primitive mentality some anthropologists have taken the view that when presenting accounts of the beliefs and experiences of the people of another culture we are not exploring some mysterious primitive mentality but the further potentialities of our own thought and language. This is sometimes taken to mean that attention has to be given to feelings and to imaginative thought as well as to the reflections of the reasoning mind. Anthropologists such as James Fernandez (1986) appeal to an anti-Cartesian tradition in philosophy associated with the work of †Vico, and emphasize the importance of the figurative and the play of †tropes in human understanding, in the way people come to terms with and define their ultimate circumstances. The difficulty here is the danger of deploying Western distinctions between the metaphorical and the literal to describe situations where the same distinctions are not recognized by the people involved. Tylor’s enquiring intellectual, but ignorant, primitive is replaced by an anxious symbolist poet.
