Techno-Primitivism and the Networked World

• In Event: The Colonial Fantasy of American Futurities

Abstract

In 1939, anthropologist Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson went to Bali to document the people of Bayung Gedé village (Fig. 1). Thirty years later, Marshall McLuhan collaborated with anthropologist Edmund Carpenter to edit an issue of fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar that explored the “tribal impulse” in the “fashion system” (Fig. 2). By examining these photographic collaborations between noted anthropologists and media theorists, this paper reveals the colonial impulse undergirding the midcentury championing of technology as a means of achieving universal humanity, a notion captured by McLuhan’s influential idea of the “global village.” Both projects positioned “tribal” social structures as nodes in the feedback loop of human progress, allowing Bateson and McLuhan to frame the Third World as an example to aspire to and evolve away from. Their approach relied upon the visual objectification of native and black bodies to justify the physical violence enacted against them by the Cold War industrial complex. In uncovering the primitivist impulse lying beneath the utopian ideal of a networked, interconnected world, this paper shows how such fantasies were historically premised upon the visual and physical subjugation of black and native bodies.

Author

• Marci Kwon, Stanford University