Primitivism and Pastoralism, ca. 1935

• In Event: Nature, For and Against II: Some Versions of Soviet Pastoral

Abstract

This talk will focus on various writers, filmmakers, and theorists from roughly 1917-1935 as they considered the place that the primitive and the pastoral in Marxist-Leninist thought and grappled with its persistence within the territories of the former Russian Empire. It takes as its background the intellectual history of “primitive communism” and the political anthropology of pastoralists, which enjoyed broad currency in the post-Revolutionary period as figures from party planners to ethnographers tackled the urgent question of what role the various peoples of the former Russian Empire, from hunter gatherers to nomadic tribes, would play in constructing socialism. It then proceeds to consider the work of three figures—the ethnographer Vladimir Arsenev, the writer Andrei Platonov, and the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein—as each engages with the question of the primitive and the pastoral in their respective works and theories.

Author

• Michael M. Kunichika, Amherst College