Last Wednesday, GRF Sam shared his area of study with us: the modern primitive. He looks at how the two seemingly opposite ideas seem to clash in the mid 1900s. He started out by asking us to help define what we believe modern and primitive mean with the aid of pictures and stories. Many of the images shown mixed things such as masculinity and femininity, industrialization and nature , and land and water. He showed us a couple of videos that exemplified the modern primitive: Josephine Baker’s The Banana Dance and The Tiller Girls.

As a former English major, I was expecting something very different walking into the talk. John Steinbeck and books like The Wasteland immediately popped into my head, but Sam’s scope of study was a pleasant surprise. I got to experience a new field of study none of my classes have touched on. I especially like how Sam was not hesitant to point out the appropriation of some cultures and the colonization that goes with imperialization. The dichotomy between those thought to be primitive and those who are modern was abundantly clear.

The video Sam showed at the end was my favorite part. First and foremost, it again showed how we seem to distance ourselves from what we see in places like museums; but in reality, we are part of the same, and the only thing that separate us is our point of view. Everything that has helped us gain knowledge has been a loss to someone else, and we should appreciate those who gave to let us gain. And the LGBT museum looked amazing, and it is somewhere I’d like to now visit.