Modernity Stories II

Primitive Marriage analyzes the conjectural history installed in Victorian anthropology and taken up by novelists, in which sex drives a civilizational progress from domination and force to liberal relations of exchange, contract, and consent. Kathy Psomiades’s act of critical reflection doubles fin-de-siècle anthropology’s reflexive turn upon its own investments in symbol and representation. Her argument models an ethically and politically responsible criticism that restores the difference of past cultural formations, viewed as unfinished, potential, and manifold in their bearing on our present.