Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
On the Sovereign Shadow
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl/Georges Chevalier
Primitive man is equally concerned about his name or image as he is with his shadow. Losing his shadow would be tantamount to feeling irreversibly lost. Any attack on his shadow is interpreted as an attack on the man himself. In West Africa, ‘murders’ are occasionally carried out by thrusting a knife or nail into a person's shadow; a perpetrator caught in this act is promptly subjected to execution.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) was a French philosopher and anthropologist known for developing the theory of primitive, pre-logical thought.
