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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Although the title of Pluciennik's essay refers to hunter-gatherers, his description of the genealogy of that concept hardly mentions them in these terms; rather, seventeenth and eighteenth century European perceptions of non-peasant pursuits and primitive societies are discussed. Certainly, the labels themselves are unimportant, it is their meaning that matters, in this case the Image of the Other. Pluciennik avoids the noble savage strand of European thinking, and instead emphasises the primitive, un-civilized counterstrand. He must have had a great time in the amassing of seventeenth century quotes on the forests and wildernesses and their most profitable use in the eyes of European merchants and their grooms. Yet most of this ground has been covered previously with a balanced account of especially the noble and the primitive aspects in Adam Kuper's 1988 essay subtitled The transformation of an illusion with a title almost identical to that of the present paper: The invention of primitive society.