The aim of my project is to investigate how the narrative of 'primitive communism' developed at the intersection of politics and ethnography in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I focus on the writings of Lewis Henry Morgan, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, and Pjotr Kropotkin, among others, who contributed significantly to the consolidation and development of the narrative. These texts build on much older themes, such as the idea of a peaceful ‘state of nature’ or a ‘golden age,’ that the authors use as examples to criticize their own societies. Since the expansion of the ‘primitive communism’ narrative is not linear, I explore a variety of different genres, including texts from the fields of political economy, economic history, political theory, moral philosophy, ethnology as well as fiction.

In the second half of the 19th century, Darwin's theory of evolution and the differentiation of ethnology as a discipline – coupled with Marx's historical materialism and communist movements – provided crucial historical conditions that modified the narrative of ‘primitive communism’. Writers simultaneously located the abstract idea of a 'state of nature' in the distant, prehistoric past as well as in the ethnological present. Specific forms of coexistence were decidedly named 'communist' and thus embedded in a concrete political and moral-philosophical context of interpretation. The ideas of evolutionism as well as an evolutionist ethnography allowed for a diachronic search for the biological foundations of human coexistence in the "animal and human world" (Kropotkin), thus providing a basis for modern sociobiology.

My work contributes to the decolonization of bodies of knowledge, as well as to scholarship on the development of knowledge about prehistory and early history, to pursue the thesis that history is always structured by political aesthetics.