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From Hobbes and Descartes to Habermas and Derrida, primitive man has been present in European reflection on sociality, political legitimacy, human nature and language. The paper gives an overview of shifting notions of primitivity since the discovery of "The New World" and shows how native Americans played a role in the scientific revolution and the demise of the great chain of being, helped bring about a revision of natural law and inspired early forms of constructivism. The paper follows the original dichotomies that defined primitivity to see how they multiplied through the centuries and were transformed into the dominant conceptual pairs of the industrial revolution (organic/mechanic, authentic/alienated, use value/exchange value). It is held that the tropes of primitivity persist in contemporary anthropology despite efforts to eradicate them. Efforts to subjectify and de-objectify the non-European are attributed to decolonization, which may continue to redress the conceptual asymmetries that still inform anthropological and historical discourse.

Introduction / Nigel Rapport, Tord Larsen, Michael Blim, Theodore M. Porter and Kalpana Ram -- Ritual repetition, uncertainty, and the search for an explanation of the 2008 crash, or how economists are doing history / Michael Blim -- Sacralizing finance, sacrificing society / Emil A. Royrvik -- Falling in the shadow of relations? Money and the fetishism of relations : belief, speculation and modes of decision-making / Tian Sørhaug -- Asylum-age numbers : the hopeless push to census the insane / Theodore M. Porter -- Paper trails and procedures in child welfare services : a cultural logic in a professional context / Petter Almklov, Jens Røyrvik and Gro Ulset -- The mutating mediatization of pandemics / Charles L. Briggs -- From grandmother's kitchen to festivals and professional chef : the standardization and ritualization of Arab food in Argentina / Lorenzo Cañás Bottos and Tanja Plasil -- The magic of "mudrās" and performance as "loving play" : the limits placed on intellectualism and rationalizing reforms by the performing arts of India / Kalpana Ram -- Enumeration and generalization, and knowing through love : the case of Stanley Spencer's artistry / Nigel Rapport -- From "wuh wuh" to "hoo-hoo" and the rituals of representing bird song, 1885-1925 / Alexandra Hui -- Archives and cultural legibility : objects and subjects of neoliberal heritage technologies / Rosemary J. Coombe and Eugenia Kisin -- Space, territory and the ritualized reification and standardized measure of nation and nature : the case of a Swedish children's story, Konrad Lorenz and "super" nationalism / Kenneth R. Olwig -- "First I turn myself into an object; then I turn myself into a work of art" : objectifying and ritualizing contemporary life / Tord Larsen.

What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring "the human" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature – "To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel this and want this" – but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. The contributors approach "the human" with an awareness of these complexities and particularities, rendering this volume unique in its ability to build on anthropology's ethnographic expertise