The surfacing of the primitive: Social reform, colonial administration, and ethnographic discourse in Great Britain and France, 1870--1914

West European ethnographic debate from 1870 was governed by a set of rules, and grounded in a set of assumptions, the formal structure of which was common to the field of social science. This, the discourse of social evolutionism, generated ethnographic knowledge by analyzing objects both statically and dynamically. Around 1900, the mutual dependence of these categories was broken, and each became epistemologically independent. This separation of the static from the dynamic structured the advent of functionalist social science, European social reform, and segregationist colonial policy. In the latter two cases, the object of social evolutionary discourse was the regulation of changes in social order.;Social evolutionist discourse prescribed two alternative arrangements for European societies: their unification through the dynamic action of progress, or the stabilization of chronic social divisions by mapping them according to the static - dynamic dichotomy. In Britain, the contact of the classes, and in France, the fusion of the classes, signified the former and historically precedent modality of unification through historical dynamics. The latter modality was signified from the late 1880's in Britain by functionalist social analysis and segregationist social policy, and in France by a theory of solidarity predicated on social oppositions, all based on social scientific thought operating in the static mode.;In the discourse of colonial administration, social evolutionism prescribed the terms by which theories of colonial assimilation were succeeded by theories of indirect rule in the British Empire, and association in the French Empire. These were put into discourse after the logic of the static - dynamic dichotomy, and were actualized in colonial segregation. The transformation of ethnographic discourse produced a notion of primitivity as a component of "civilization" rather than distinct from it. The augmentation of agency affecting this category applied to the subjects of European ethnography, the European working classes, and the colonial subject, and was a result of subaltern contestation of dominant discursive configurations.