On May 5th, Anthropology graduate student Luke Forrester Johnson successfully defended his dissertation “Dialectic of Primitivism: Racial Fetishism & Enlightenment in the Shadows of French Empire.”
This dissertation argues that primitivism continues to haunt anthropology because of the discipline’s ambivalent relationship to a core Enlightenment tenet: myth-busting as moral act. Prevailing anthropological critiques of racialization turn on a semiotic ideology that is itself racialized, originating in European dismissals of African religious practices (fetishism). In this moral economy of proper and improper knowing, primitivists and racial fetishists are cast as modern, secular subjects who suffer and subjugate because of their mystification. As a result, primitivists continuously swap places with the “primitives” they dream up. Luke calls this oscillation primitive dialectics. To trace these dialectics, he explores the erotic and spiritual pursuits of self-avowed racial fetishists and primitivists. Drawing on 18 months of research in Paris and supplementary work in Martinique and Benin, he shows how a sympathetic yet critical ethnography of these two groups challenges foundational theoretical assumptions of anti-racist anthropology.
Luke's dissertation defense committee included his two co-advisers Elizabeth Davis and Serguei Oushakine, as well as his two examiners Laurence Ralph and Christy Wampole (French & Italian). He will begin a three-year postdoctoral fellowship with Brown University beginning this Fall 2025.
