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The paper analyses Sarajevo's music movement of New Primitives and its 'poetics of the local' as a struggle against the cultural hypocrisy of Yugoslavia's 'new socialist culture' and its privileging of 'external-cosmopolitan' as apotheosis of cultured refinement and sophistication while denigrating 'local-parochial' as epitome of uncultured primitiveness. I argue that the movement's praxis is best understood as a call to reject externally-imposed frames of reference as the basis for self-understanding, and to embrace a socio-cultural awareness that the only way to be in the world is to be authentically 'primitive'- i.e. to exist as a distinct and autochthon socio-cultural self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]