Abstract

Departing from the idea that Western cosmology has been, since the fifth century BCE, significantly built around the notion of a universe inhabited by different species-beings arranged in hierarchical order, and according mainly to the capacity for "logical" and "rational" thought particular to each species, this work attempts to show how the construction of so-called "primitive" peoples as cognitively-inferior others cannot be properly understood in independence from this cosmology. It was this latter cosmology that conformed the pre-understanding that Westerners had of primitive peoples before actually coming in contact with them, and which marked the direction and form that the construction of the primitive would assume once 'discovered.' It has been mainly within anthropology, as a discipline originally devoted to the study of primitive groups, that the construction of the primitive as an intellectually and cognitively inferior being has found its most developed form. The supposed inferiority of primitive thought processes has been posed as a solid scientific/empirical fact. One of the major aims of the present work is to trace the history of discursive practices about the idea of a "primitive mind" within anthropology. With the aim of pointing to the relevance of the anthropological construction of the primitive as an intellectual inferior other for the contemporary world, the work takes as a second major aim the identification, by reference to key contemporary works in the philosophy of science, of not only the modes in which we can transcend the ethnocentric connotations inherent to these arguments, but also, and more important, the lessons that can be extracted from such arguments for the construction of a just society of knowledge today. The construction of non-Western inferior Others continues to inform the dominant belief systems of the Western imagination, and continues to do so in ways that serve to legitimize the devaluation and exclusion of peoples and cultural groups in ways that run counter to the our most basic values of freedom and democracy. The general aim of this work is to develop a critique of traditions that are still very much alive , and that serve as obstacles to a critical assessment and revaluing of other ways of thought and being