Adventures in the archaic: Bataille, Devereux, Eliade, and Lefebvre after 1945

“Adventures in the Archaic” unearths a revivalist sensibility that flourished in France in the first years of the Anthropocene. After the Second World War, four like-minded intellectuals cultivated archaic folkways in the fields of prehistory, ethnopsychiatry, rural sociology, and the history of religions. To reveal this peculiar tradition in the French human sciences, I examine the intellectual biographies of four protagonists: Georges Bataille, a novelist, anthropology enthusiast, and amateur prehistorian; Henri Lefebvre, a Marxist philosopher turn rural sociologist turned urban theorist; Georges Devereux, a pioneering ethnographer and trained psychiatrist; and Mircea Eliade, one of the best-known historians of religion. In the crucible of the Great Acceleration, this unlikely quartet argued that what had survived the long passage of time mattered more than ever. Their work was marked by an antipathy toward modernization and a reverence for what they called “survivals”—traditions that they believed would provide a living link to more archaic styles of life. Their reverence for the age-old was not a rustic dream or a wistful mourning but a humanistic response to relentless change. They were exemplars of how to think of the past not as a foreign country but as a familiar place of possibility. “Adventures in the Archaic” takes us through the Lascaux caves, the French Pyrenees, and the American Southwest and into our relationship with art, ecstasy, religion, and what remains of the deep past. In four chapters I explore how ideas related to survivals helped break the disdain and collective amnesia surrounding prehistoric, provincial, and primitive cultures. The first chapter enters directly into the depths of the archaic world and explores the prehistoric painted caves at Lascaux. In a protest against demands for continuous growth, Georges Bataille eulogized Paleolithic cultures by emphasizing the seasonal rites of clever primates who wanted to live life to the fullest. Chapter 2, on the sociologist Henri Lefebvre, plunges further into the traditions of the French Southwest. An analysis of Lefebvre’s rural sociology reveals how the Marxist theorist of the urban environment built his theoretical arsenal by listening to the sounds and symbols of Pyrenean peasant communities. The third chapter looks back to Georges Devereux’s experience in the American Southwest among the Mohave. It shows how shamanism served as a vehicle for radically rethinking modern psychiatry and present-day mores. The last chapter examines Mircea Eliade’s memorable role in redefining the place of pagan cultures in the history of religions. In the middle of the terrible twentieth century, Eliade argued that the tenets of archaic religions, especially those rooted in cyclical notions of time, provided a much-needed bulwark against the terror of history. Drawing on extensive research in France and the United States, I bring together for the first time the intellectuals, books, and passages that celebrated cultural survival between 1945 and 1964. The pages that follow examine survivals and related ideas in their specific historical context and suggest why a revivalist sensibility might still matter today. Each of the “postwar revivalists” was guided by the belief that certain cultural survivals were both the antipode and the antidote to postwar society. An unorthodox project of recovery and revival, I go on to argue, emerged out of their critique of modern industrial society. Their idea was simple: well-worn cultures cultivated less alienating, more intimate, and more sustainable ways of life. They thought it was necessary to look backward in order to move forward. In the decades to come, ecological degradation will force us to take a hard look at the fantasy of endless growth and the culture of voracious development embraced by western societies after 1945. In the process, it may well be that societies once disparaged as prehistoric, provincial, and primitive will suddenly be seen in a whole new light.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Allen, Ryan L

Contributors dc:contributor

• Chaplin, Tamara
• Mathy, Jean-Philippe R.
• Micale, Mark S.
• Ghamari-Tabrizi, Behrooz

• postwar France
• intellectual history
• French human and social sciences
• survivals
• archaic
• primitive
• revival
• Anthropocene
• Georges Bataille
• Georges Devereux
• Mircea Eliade
• Henri Lefebvre
• Lascaux
• Mohave
• shamanism
• ethnopsychiatry
• French Pyrenees
• rural sociology.

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2021 Ryan L. Allen

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113164

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/113164