'Savage' Thought

We approach the concept of "savage thought" from Ginger Nolan, in her analysis of how structuralism dismantled 'racial difference' by demonstrating that human cognitive structures are common to all humans. She also notes that white culture was practically not the subject of anthropology before the end of the 20th century. XX. Based on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, in particular, "The Savage Mind", Ginger notes Lévi-Strauss' strategy to refute the very term [['primitive']] and the respective notion as an inaptitude for theoretical and abstract thinking . This strategy involved distinguishing between the concepts of "bricolage" and "engineering", aligning engineering with western technoscience and bricolage with "science we prefer to call 'prior' rather than 'primitve'." Ginger, highlights the cybernetic plane where Levi-Strauss moves, in which this techno-scientific laboratory establishes the bricoleur also as a matter of experience, often as a racialized figure. Despite not establishing explicit hierarchical and racial relations, for Lévi-Strauss, bricolage appears as the first universal cognitive structure. Therefore, the bricoleur can be framed in a laboratory in which the engineer occupies a privileged and sovereign position. The laboratory is the place where depoliticization, technologies of government and new forms of economic organization are developed. Thus, in the impossibility of biological-racial distinction, the developed techniques maintain the structure of racialization, establishing the distinction between bricoleurs, allegedly unaware of their way of thinking, and engineers, systems designers and great beneficiaries of these same systems. Savage thought is a form of "governing by design", which depoliticizes the negotiation of difference, maintaining the racialization structures of those who design the system on those who, supposedly, cannot think and politicize it.