Prior to attending the Rose Café with Sam Legasse, I did not know what modern primitives were. Being in a major where we never discuss these terms motivated me to attend the Rose Café this week and see what I can learn from an entirely different field. The first concept Sam discussed was the modern, where he portrayed this idea by showing a clip of the Tiller Girls, as their regimented performance represented what it meant to be modern. Sam also demonstrated the modern by showing a picture of a train moving across the ocean, with one interpretation being how global communication and transportation had become modern with the increase in technology. Second, Sam showed a picture of a museum, where the old artifacts served to represent the primitive. Finally, he brought together the modern and the primitive by discussing colonialism, starting with a picture of a Belgian officer comparing his height to a slave’s height in Africa. This picture, according to our discussion, showed how the modern, or the Belgian officer and the Belgian “modern” lifestyle, intersected with the primitive, or the slave who lived the “primitive” lifestyle. The more we spoke about colonialism and the global slave trade in context with modern primitives, I became more disgusted about this part of world history, where millions of African slaves died.
I was also intrigued during our discussion about how modern primitives are found in our lives today. Sam used the example of the Paleo diet, where people eat like the cavemen because it is more real, and what we eat in modern times is artificial and manufactured. Thus, not only did I learn more about where modern primitives fit in with world history, I learned how today, some of us also use the concept of modern primitives in our daily lives.