Roger Sandall on the delusions of 'romantic primitivism'

"Bohemian primitivism is [mainly] in the mind. The community yearned for is symbolic, not actual. Its undivided organic wholeness is something imagined rather than observed. The unique aesthetic sensibilities remote communities embody are hypothesised -- deduced from pretty textiles or attractive pots. And even if one takes the trouble to visit such places, one is still only a tourist who stays briefly before returning to the safety of a waiting metropolis with hot baths and digestible food.

"But the cream of the jest is to come. This is a tale of unrequited love. The French intellectual may admire the Andalusian muleteer, but the muleteer thinks he's mad. There may indeed be a brown-skinned woman with burning eyes waiting for Flaubert, whispering the language of the houris. But the words she whispers are “only for cash”.

"True Arabs find Englishmen galloping about on camels incomprehensible. True Masai know only that if they stand around long enough with their spears they will be paid. Ordinary Nepalese are scandalised by hippies. In the good old days, in New Zealand, if these dropouts from civilization had dropped in on the Maori they would have quickly been killed and eaten.

"The Big Ditch which yawns between the sentimentalism of romantic primitivism and the pragmatism of the native is almost immeasurably wide. In fact the only thing which bridges it -- despite the supposedly pristine pre-capitalist virtue of the natives -- is the cash nexus the Culture Cultists are fleeing from."

--Roger Sandall, "Enter the Noble Savage", from The Culture Cult (2001)