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“Primitive mentality” as a book category gathers works that explore historically described premodern or small-scale-society modes of thought—mythic, animistic, ritual, and communal reasoning—alongside contemporary analyses and critiques of that concept. It spans classic anthropology and psychology on early human cognition, cognitive archaeology and evolutionary accounts of symbolic behavior, comparative mythology and folklore, and ethnographies or literary narratives that depict or interrogate magic, taboo, shamanism, and oral cosmologies. Central themes include how people make sense of causality, self, nature, and the sacred outside industrial-scientific frameworks, while also examining the term’s colonial and pejorative baggage and the continuities with so-called “modern” cognition. The aim is empathetic, context-rich understanding of diverse worldviews rather than ranking them, pairing foundational texts with up-to-date reassessments.

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