Metropolis, Colony, Primitive

Abstract

Few writers proved more influential in establishing the key co-ordinates for the colonial mapping of relations of time and space characterising the late Victorian period than John Lubbock. His 1865 text Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages helped to consolidate the view, in popular thought as well as in the developing practices of archaeology, that the time of distant colonial peripheries could be equated with that of the prehistoric past of metropolitan centres. Yet, while freezing the savage in the static time of the primitive, Lubbock took issue with degenerationist accounts in which the colonised appeared to have fallen from an earlier, higher level of development and, in some versions, to be caught in an un-stoppable, terminal decline. This was, he argues, a false reading of the relations between the time of the primitive and that of the metropolis, registering a failure to compensate for the perspectival mobility of the modern observer. „The delusion is natural,“ he wrote, „and like that which every one must have sometimes experienced in looking out of a train in motion, when the woods and fields seem to be flying from us, whereas we know that in reality we are moving and they are stationary.“¹ Lorimer Fison, a Methodist missionary in Australia and, like Lubbock, keen to keep open the prospect that the savage might yet become civilised, held to a similar view in arguing that primitive peoples had indeed progressed, but had done so only very slowly. If they appeared to be standing still, this was „because their progress, like that of the so-called fixed stars, is imperceptible to us as we watch.“²