Kerim's Academic Reading Journal

By Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in Recapturing Anthropology.

For Rousseau, as for More and Defoe, the savage is an argument for a particular kind of utopia. For Iselin and Meiners, as for Swift and Hobbes in other times and contexts, it is an argument against it… The nineteenth century blurred the most visible signs of this thematic correspondence by artificially separating utopia and the savage… From then on, utopia and the savage evolved as two distinguishable slots. Kant had set the philosophical grounds for this separation by laying his own teleology without humor or fiction while moving way from the Naturinstink Nineteenth-century French positivists, in turn, derided utopias as chimeric utopianisms.