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, Adventures in the Archaic: Primitivism, Degrowth, and the French Social Sciences, 1945–1975, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in January 2026. The title, Adventures in the Archaic, has two meanings. One meaning is the effect of the archaic on four distinguished intellectuals in the French social sciences. This unique framing leads to a wide-ranging exploration into such subjects as sacrifice, survivals, shamanism, and cyclical notions of time. The other meaning is my own adventure in the life and work of four remarkable primitivistic reformers. After traveling where they did and after a decade traveling in their words, I reexamine the principles and merits of primitivism, a much-maligned intellectual tradition.
In four interlocking chapters, I develop the connections between the lay prehistorian Georges Bataille, the ethnopsychiatrist Georges Devereux, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, and the rural sociologist Henri Lefebvre. In the process, I reveal the times and places as well as the how and why of what I call “postwar primitivism.” Between 1945 and 1975, the postwar primitivists took the very old seriously; they saw in it a vital link to the past and a living bridge to a more sustainable future. Their hearts ached at the destruction of the deep past, so they dragged their feet, took risks, and resisted the new-fangled forces of the Great Acceleration. Out of so much modernization and cultural disintegration, I argue, a peculiar kind of primitivism was born.
Drawing upon a vast array of primary and secondary sources, Adventures in the Archaic focuses on the points where primitivism and degrowth imperatives intersect. The book asks us to look at primitivism anew, to see it not as a dangerous dead end but as a solid stepping-stone off our current course of unabated growth.