I wanted to compile a short reading list for personal introduction into the field of comparative epistemics and primitivist philosophy—not so much because I endorse the views of these particular books myself, but because they helped me map my own course through the sciences and the thicket of philosophy in ways that are not well paved yet in academia.
The primary epistemic causeway of primitivist philosophy is through an anthropology of origins towards the limits of metacognitive universalism.
By studying the historical and cultural context of academia itself, and its material artifacts in the form of modern society, we build an epistemic that does not rely on presumptions of cultural determinism or supremacy to vindicate the ways it seeks to understand and interact with knowledge, language, and the world.
In other words, by recognizing the particular and also the universal in human nature, we become more objective.
It’s one of the ironies of my way of thinking that I think legitimizing cultural relativity is a form of study of the human psyche and its anthropological expression that helps us better understand and synthesize universal human experience—rather than allowing ourselves to be seduced by the cradling miasma of subjectivity.
I think trends in academia are looking to overthrow the Enlightenment as the only cohesive answer to postmodernist deconstruction (philosophical—not literal) of institutions, languages, and presumptions of ethno-supremacy. I believe we can do better with the opportunity presented to us, but at the expense of granting ourselves the immunity of feeling superhuman in the trials of life and the quest for knowledge.
We are no more or less human than we have ever been.
Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee – Dee Brown
Dreamtime – Hans Peter Deürr
Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky
Lame Deer : Seeker of Visions : John Fire Lame Deer & Richard Erodes
The Masks of God (Vol. I-IV) – Joseph Campbell
Techqua Ikachi [My Land, My Life] – Newsletter Series by the Hopi Traditionalists at Hótevilla
Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths – Vine Deloria, Jr.
Collected Works – Sigmund Freud
The Way of Zen – Alan Watts
Society of the Spectacle – Guy Debord
Elements of Refusal – John Zerzan
Against Civilization – Ed. by John Zerzan
A Language Older Than Words – Derrick Jensen
The Culture of Make Believe – Derrick Jensen
Strangely Like War : The Global Assaults on Forests – Derrick Jensen
The Gnostic I Ching – James DeKorne et.al
Tao te Ching – Lao Tzu
Les mots et les choses – une archéologie des sciences humaines [The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences] – Michel Foucault
Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique – Folie et déraison [Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason] – Michel Foucault
Blue and Brown Books [aka. Philosophical Investigations] – Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Mismeasure of Man – Stephen Jay Gould
77 Dream Songs – John Berryman
Beyond Good and Evil – Freidrich Nietzsche
On the Geneaology of Morality – Freidrich Nietzsche
Stone Age Economics – Marshall Sahlins
The Mountain Chant – Navajo, Traditional (Collected and Transcribed by Washington Matthews, 1887)
Ecclesiastes – Attributed to Solomon, King James Trs. Holy Bible
Xinxin Ming [Song of the Faithful Mind] – Jianzhi Sengcan
Book of the Damned – Charles Fort
The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe – Lynn Thorndike
A Balanced Account of the World: A Critical Look at the Scientific World View – Wolfi Landstreicher
The Celtic Twilight – W.B. Yeats
I would like to include other forms of media which have assisted me in developing philosophies around symbolic cognition, like music and documentary film. I’ll return to that project soon.
Again, these works were inspirations and books that challenged my perspective. They are not listed here as endorsements or even as roadmaps. It’s more like a star chart where you may draw your own constellations.
