Critics traditionally define the “primitivism” of the 1920s and 1930s as a psychoanalytically influenced Western elite practice in which artists treated “natives” and native cultures as sources of rejuvenation in a rapidly modernizing world. Primitivists assumed that modernization and its accompanying social norms separated modern Western people from their authentic impulses: sexuality, physicality, violence and play. Rather than considering natives as simply deficient in “civilization,” primitivists saw them as conduits to the unconscious or as alternatives to Western civilization's rationality, bureaucracy and mechanization. Paradoxically, primitivist representations of natives were, as Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush maintain, “a highly charged signal of otherness … that came to signify modernity.” Thus, primitivists see natives as unaware of the significance of modernization or their relationship to it, but primitivists themselves, as rebellious cultural relativists, can understand both modern and primitive modes of thought.

Perceiving the native as the leading edge of modernity allows us to understand modernists' affiliations with the primitive as stemming from political rather than metaphysical concerns. Modernists may have used “natives” or “primitive art” to invoke tangible remnants of “pre-history” – fragments to make modernity and modernization visible – but their materials always emerged as by-products of Western exploration, conquest and territorial organization. In this chapter, I emphasize the geopolitical aspects of modernism's natives and primitives.

Elite Westerners could see that the technological modernization of occupied territory – roads, schools, sanitation, commerce – had to be accompanied by governmental or administrative modernization.