Primitive Societies as Alterity

Definition

Primitive societies as alterity is The Mirror of Production's anthropological thesis: earlier societies are not underdeveloped cases of ours but another principle, and the demand that they be brought to bear on Marxism rather than interpreted by it. The negative half of the thesis is blunt: "There is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies. There is no dialectic and no unconscious in primitive societies. These concepts analyze only our own societies, which are ruled by political economy" (ch. I, "Epistemology I: In the Shadow of Marxist Concepts", pp. 47–48). The corollary demolishes the standard economic picture: "There are no producers; there are no 'means of production' and no objective labor, controlled or not. There are no needs and no satisfactions that orient them: this is the old illusion of subsistence economy!" (ch. III, "Surplus and Anti-Production", p. 74).

The positive half is symbolic circulation. "Symbolic circulation is primordial. Things of functional use are taken from that sphere… Nothing remains because survival is not a principle. We have made it one. For the primitives, eating, drinking, and living are first of all acts that are exchanged: if they are not exchanged, they do not occur" (ch. III, "Surplus and Anti-Production", pp. 76–77). Exchange is therefore not equivalence but relation: "the exchange-gift, to be exact, operates not according to the evaluation or equivalence of exchanged goods but according to the antagonistic reciprocity of persons" (same section) — a reciprocity of obligations, not of contracting individuals. Goods are deliberately kept scarce of surplus: they "are apportioned and limited, often imported from far away according to strict rules," because "given over to individual or group production, they would risk being proliferated and thereby break the fragile mechanism of reciprocity" (same section) — "the exact opposite of our economy based on unlimited production of goods" (p. 77). Scarcity, in this register, is the condition of exchange rather than its deficit (see anti-production).

The methodological demand is explicit: "Instead of exporting Marxism and psychoanalysis (not to mention bourgeois ideology, although at this level there is no difference), we bring all the force and questioning of primitive societies to bear on Marxism and psychoanalysis" (ch. I, "Epistemology I", p. 49). Anthropological misrecognition therefore has an aggressive side. The practices that get rewritten as faulty production are ritual through and through — "primitive man does not chop one tree or trace one furrow without 'appeasing the spirits' with a counter-gift or sacrifice… The final product is never aimed for" (ch. III, "Magic and Labor", pp. 81–83) — and the economic rewriting of them is named as a mission: "this is the baptism of production: the baptism of labor and value for nature and goods lost in the gratuity of their richness… The materialist missionaries have arrived" (ch. III, "Surplus and Anti-Production", pp. 79–80). Baudrillard adds that such conceptual violence is "even more destructive than missionaries or venereal disease" (same section).

Lévi-Strauss supplies the emblematic case. The book's sarcasm about psychoanalysis — "the Bororos are closer to primitive processes than we are" (ch. I, "Epistemology I") — rests on the anthropologist's classic example (translator's note: "the Bororos are a South American society studied by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques"); the wiki's source note files Lévi-Strauss under "the Bororos; the 'raw and the cooked' reflexivity." The museum is the book's image for what interpretation does to alterity: "all other cultures were entered in its museum as vestiges of its own image," and even the materialist critique continues the process — "their anthropological relegation to a museum, a process originated in bourgeois society, continues under the sign of its critique" (ch. III, "Epistemology III: Materialism and Ethnocentrism"). The failure is structural, not incidental: historical materialism "does not know how to grasp earlier societies in their symbolic articulation," and "a culture that is mistaken about another must also be mistaken about itself" (ch. IV, "Epistemology IV: Marxism and Miscomprehension", p. 107).

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the thesis's author: neither production nor mode of production in primitive societies; symbolic circulation as primordial; the Anthropologist's museum as misrecognition (1973/1975).
• Claude Lévi-Strauss — the ethnographic reference (the Bororos) and the structural-anthropological frame within which the symbolic order is read; his reflexivity about the observer is the book's implicit ally.
• Karl Marx — the thinker whose categories the book refuses to export; the demand is that primitive societies question Marxism, not the reverse.
• Marcel Mauss (not yet paged) — the gift and counter-gift, the anthropological mechanism the book's "symbolic exchange" presupposes.
• Maurice Godelier and Marshall Sahlins (not yet paged) — Godelier as the target of the "adjustment" critique; Sahlins cited for the primitive "affluent society" whose non-growth the West cannot think (see anti-production).
• Sigmund Freud — named in the same breath as Marx: "no unconscious in primitive societies" (see unconscious).

Related Concepts

• mode-of-production — the concept whose projection onto all history the thesis refuses.
• anti-production — the mechanism that keeps goods circulating rather than accumulating.
• symbolic-exchange — the principle opposed to production and to value.
• primitivism — the vault's adjacent, primarily architectural/thematic material on the primitive as figure.
• unconscious — the second exported concept; the book denies its universality along with the dialectic's.
• artisanal-mode — the adjacent archaic/feudal case, where reciprocal obligation survives into production.
• otherness — the general term for the alterity the argument demands.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the thesis's core: "There is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies" (ch. I, pp. 47–48); "instead of exporting Marxism and psychoanalysis… we bring all the force and questioning of primitive societies to bear on Marxism and psychoanalysis" (ch. I, p. 49); "symbolic circulation is primordial" and "eating, drinking, and living are first of all acts that are exchanged" (ch. III, pp. 76–77); and "the materialist missionaries have arrived" (ch. III, pp. 79–80).
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is the primitive/symbolic order an ethnographic finding or a construct built against political economy? The book leans on Mauss and Bataille and on polemic rather than field evidence; Sahlins and Vernant are cited in passing.
• If "these concepts analyze only our own societies," how does Baudrillard know that primitive societies possess symbolic exchange rather than, say, other forms of calculation? Poster's relativism objection applies with full force here.
• What is the status of the museum argument — a claim about Western knowledge or about the societies known? It attributes the misrecognition to the form of the knowing, which is why it cannot be repaired by better data.
• Does the argument's demand — that primitive societies be brought to bear on Marxism rather than the reverse — survive the collapse of "primitive" as a category in later anthropology? See primitivism and universalism-vs-relativism.