Research
My research illuminates where intellectuals, social scientists, and so-called primitive cultures converge to uncover archaic solutions to modern problems. I gravitate toward examples of cultural and ecological stewardship in prehistoric, provincial, and postcolonial societies. A first expression of my ideas appeared in “Resurrecting the Archaic,” a 2021 article for the journal Modern Intellectual History which won the Joseph Ward Swain Publication Prize.
My book manuscript, Adventures in the Archaic: Primitivism, Degrowth, and the French Social Sciences, 1945–1975, examines how age-old cultural traditions can serve as bulwarks against today’s raging desire for growth. At the very moment when the postwar “economic miracle” ushered in the Anthropocene, a number of intellectuals with ties to the French social sciences responded to the accelerating times by reappraising cultures long dismissed as primitive and passé. Drawing on extensive research in France and the United States, I show how Georges Bataille, Georges Devereux, Mircea Eliade, and Henri Lefebvre insisted on the importance of cultural survivals in the fields of prehistory, ethnopsychiatry, rural sociology, and the history of religion. Their reverence for the age-old was not a rustic dream or a wistful mourning but a humanistic response to breakneck modernization.
In addition to preparing my dissertation for publication, I am currently working on an introduction to Charlotte Delbo’s Theory and Practice: An Imaginary but Not Entirely Apocryphal Dialogue between Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre. Published in 1969 and all but forgotten today, Delbo’s literary prowess is on full display as she imagines a debate between the two sociologists most often associated with the events of May 1968. I am also writing an article on the history of a collection of thirty-one travel books called Petite Planète. Written under the direction of the French filmmaker Chris Marker between 1954 and 1964, this visually striking series understood long before others that place can’t be separated from the styles of life that traverse it.