Film poster for D. W. Griffith's 1913 film The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, showing a depiction of a Native American warrior as a depraved child murderer and threat to the purity of white womanhood
Stereotypes of Indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States of America include many ethnic stereotypes
found worldwide which include historical misrepresentations and the
oversimplification of hundreds of Indigenous cultures. Negative
stereotypes are associated with prejudice and discrimination that continue to affect the lives of Indigenous peoples.
It is believed that some portrayals of Natives, such as their depiction as bloodthirsty savages
have disappeared. However, most portrayals are oversimplified and
inaccurate; these stereotypes are found particularly in popular media
which is the main source of mainstream images of Indigenous peoples
worldwide.
The stereotyping of American Indians must be understood in the context of history which includes conquest, forced displacement, and organized efforts to eradicate native cultures, such as the boarding schools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which separated young Native Americans from their families to educate and to assimilate them as European Americans. There are also many examples of seemingly positive stereotypes which rely on European "noble savage" imagery, but also contribute to the infantilization of Indigenous cultures.
The first difficulty in addressing stereotypes is the terminology to
use when referring to Indigenous peoples, which is an ongoing
controversy. The truly stereotype-free names would be those of
individual nations. A practical reference to Indigenous peoples, in
general, is "American Indian" in the United States and "First Nations"
or "Indigenous" in Canada. The peoples collectively referred to as Inuit
have their own unique stereotypes. The communities to which Indigenous
peoples belong also have various names, typically "nation" or "tribe" in
the United States, but "comunidad" (Spanish for "community") in South
America.
All global terminology must be used with an awareness of the
stereotype that "Indians" are a single people, when in fact there are
hundreds of individual ethnic groups, who are all native to the Americas, just as the term "Europeans"
carries an understanding that there are some similarities but also many
differences between the peoples of an entire continent.
Since the first Europeans made landfall in North America, Native
peoples have suffered under a weltering array of stereotypes,
misconceptions and caricatures. Whether portrayed as noble savages, ignoble savages, teary-eyed environmentalists, drunken, living off the Government, Indian princess/Squaw or most recently, simply as casino-rich,
native peoples find their efforts to be treated with a measure of
respect and integrity undermined by images that flatten complex tribal,
historical and personal experience into one-dimensional representations
that tells us more about the depicters than about the depicted.
Carter Meland (Anishinaabe heritage) and David E. Wilkins (Lumbee), professors of Native American Studies at the University of Minnesota.
Myths about American Indians can be understood in the context of the metanarrative of the United States, which was originally "manifest destiny" and has now become "American exceptionalism". Myths and stereotypes persist because they fit into these narratives, which Americans use to understand their own history. This history includes the description of Native Americans in the Declaration of Independence as "merciless Indian savages". These stereotypes have historical, cultural, and racial characteristics.
Historical misconceptions
There are numerous distortions of history, many of which continue as stereotypes.
There is the myth that Indians are a dying race, i.e. "The
Vanishing Red Man", when in fact census data shows an increase in the
number of individuals who were American Indians and Alaska Natives or
American Indian and Alaska Native in combination with one or more other
races.
There is an assumption that Indians lost possession of their land because they were inferior, when the reality is:
Many of the Indigenous peoples died from Old World diseases to which they lacked any immunity.
There were a number of advanced civilizations in the Americas, but they did lack two important resources: a pack animal large enough to carry a human; and the ability to make steel for tools and weapons.
Purchase of Manhattan
The "purchase" of Manhattan island from Indians is a cultural misunderstanding. In 1626 the director of the Dutch settlement, Peter Minuit, traded sixty guilders worth of goods with the Lenni Lenape
people, which they would have accepted as gifts in exchange for
allowing the settlers to occupy the land. Though Native Americans had a
communal conception of property, they had no conception of a fee simple.
Pocahontas
The story told by John Smith of his rescue by the daughter of Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas,
is generally thought by historians to be a fabrication. Pocahontas was
most likely eleven or twelve at the time, and this popular tale of the "Indian princess" and Smith's story changed over many retellings.
Cultural and ethnic misconceptions
The
Media Awareness Network of Canada (MNet) has prepared several
statements about the portrayals of American Indians, First Nations of
Canada, and Alaskan Natives in the media. Westerns and documentaries have tended to portray Natives in stereotypical terms: the wise elder, the aggressive drunk, the Indian princess,
the loyal sidekick, the obese and impoverished. These images have
become known across North America. Stereotyped issues include simplistic
characterizations, romanticizing of Native culture, and stereotyping by
omission—showing American Indians in a historical rather than modern
context.
There is also the outdated stereotype that American Indians and
Alaskan Natives live on reservations when in fact only about 25% do, and
a slight majority now live in urban areas.
There is an assumption that Indians somehow have an intuitive
knowledge of their culture and history when the degree of such knowledge
varies greatly depending upon the family and community connections of
each individual.
Native American and First Nations women are frequently sexually objectified and are often stereotyped as being promiscuous.
Such misconceptions lead to murder, rape, and violence against Native
American or First Nations women and girls by non-Native men and
sometimes women.
An Algonquin word, the term "squaw"
is now widely deemed offensive due to its use for hundreds of years in a
derogatory context. However, there remain more than a thousand
locations in the U.S. that incorporate the term in its name.
Indigenous men and sports mascotry
In
early colonial writings, the most common portrayal of Native men came
in the form of what Robert Berkhofer calls "savage images of the Indian
as not only hostile but depraved.". In later times, particularly under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of the noble savage,
Native American men were portrayed by European sources as fierce
warriors that Euro-American writers called braves. Berkhofer summarizes
this idea as follows:
friendly, courteous, and hospitable to the initial invaders of
his lands and to all Whites so long as the latter honored the
obligations presumed to be mutually entered into with the tribe. Along
with handsomeness of physique and physiognomy went great stamina and
endurance. Modest in attitude if not always in dress, the noble Indian
exhibited great calm and dignity in bearing, conversation, and even
under torture. Brave in combat, he was tender in love for family and
children.
There have been issues with the continuation of professional team names and mascots especially in the Washington Redskins name controversy.
In 2013, President Obama and NBC sportscaster Bob Costas voiced their
objection to the name. After a petition, the Trademark and Trial Appeal
Board ordered the cancellation of six federal trademark registrations in
2014. The Redskins are appealing this ruling. The team was renamed the Washington Football Team in 2020. And in 2022 was renamed again as the Washington Commanders.
Substance use
Because of the high frequency of American Indian alcoholism,
it is sometimes used stereotypically when portraying them. As with most
groups, the incidence of substance use is related to issues of poverty
and mental distress, both of which may sometimes be in part the result
of racial stereotyping and discrimination.
This stereotype became most prominent in the mid to late twentieth
century when alcoholism became the number one cause of death according
to the Indian Health Services
(IHS). Reports from the mid-1980s state that this was the time period
when the IHS began to primarily target the treatment of alcoholism over
its past treatments of infectious diseases. Treatment for substance use disorders by Native Americans is more effective when it is community-based, and addresses the issues of cultural identification.
Ecology-affiliated stereotypes
One
named stereotype with affiliation to ecology is the "Noble Savage"
stereotype. When referring to American Indians as "Noble Savages", it is
implied that these individuals have acquired a special kinship with
their "land, water, and wildlife". Furthermore, this stereotype
implicitly states that American Indians do not allow themselves or their
environment to be corrupted by commercialization or industrialization
and that they strive to preserve their environment and keep it
untouched. This stereotype has stemmed from the long-term enthrallment
many non-natives have had with this particular minority group, causing
American Indians to be viewed as "objects of reverence and fascination".
Kat Anderson's book, Tending the wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources,
delves into the "hunter-gatherer" stereotype which describes survival
solely on hunting animals and gathering of berries and other plants. The
author attempts to break this stereotype by illustrating the varied
ways Indigenous peoples of California tended and supported their
environment. California Natives have utilized methods, such as effective
harvesting, controlled burning, and selectively pruning, in order to
maintain their environment and keep many plant and animal species
flourishing. Through the book, Anderson wanted to accurately spread the
ecological knowledge of California natives to shed light on the impact
these groups have had on surrounding wildlife areas.
Inuit stereotypes
Inuit, often referred to as Eskimos (which many see as derogatory), are usually depicted dressed in parkas, paddling kayaks, which the Inuit invented, carving out trinkets, living in igloos, fishing with a harpoon, hunting whales, traveling by sleigh and huskies, eating cod liver oil, and the men are called Nanook from the documentary Nanook of the North. Eskimo children may have a seal for a best friend.
Eskimos are sometimes shown rubbing noses together in greeting ritual, referred to as Eskimo kissing in Western culture, and only loosely based on an authentic Inuit practice known as kunik. They are also often depicted surrounded by polar bears or walruses.
Effect of stereotyping
Stereotypes
harm both the victims and those that perpetuate them, with effects on
society at large. Victims suffer emotional distress: anger, frustration,
insecurity, and feelings of hopelessness. Most of all, Indian children
exposed at an early age to these mainstream images internalize the
stereotypes paired with the images, resulting in lower self-esteem,
contributing to all of the other problems faced by American Indians.
Stereotypes become discrimination when the assumptions of being more
prone to violence and alcoholism limit job opportunities. This leads
directly to Indians being viewed less stable economically, making it
more difficult for those that have succeeded to fully enjoy the benefits
in the same way that non-Indians do, such as obtaining credit. For
those that maintain them, stereotypes prevent a more accurate view of
Indians and the history of the United States.
Research also demonstrates the harm done to society by
stereotyping of any kind. Two studies examined the effect of exposure to
an American Indian sports mascot on the tendency to endorse stereotypes
of a different minority group. A study was first done at the University
of Illinois and then replicated at The College of New Jersey with the
same results. Students were given a paragraph to read about Chief
Illiniwek adapted from the University of Illinois' official website,
while the control group was given a description of an arts center. In
both studies, the students exposed to the sports mascot were more likely
to express stereotypical views of Asian-Americans. Although Chief
Illiniwek was described only in terms of positive characteristics (as a
respectful symbol, not a mascot), the stereotyping of Asian-Americans
included negative characteristics, such as being "socially inept". This
was indicative of a spreading effect; exposure to any stereotypes
increased the likelihood of stereotypical thinking.
In Alabama, at a game between the Pinson Valley High School "Indians" and McAdory High School, the latter team displayed a banner using a disparaging reference to the Trail of Tears
for which the principal of the school apologized to Native Americans,
stated that the cheerleader squad responsible would be disciplined and
that all students would be given a lesson on the actual history of the
Trail of Tears. Native Americans responded that it was an example of the
continuing insensitivity and stereotyping of Indians in America. A similar sign was displayed in Tennessee by the Dyersburg Trojans when they played the Jackson Northside Indians.
The effect that stereotyping has had on Indigenous women is one
of the main reasons why non-Indigenous people commit violent crimes of
hate towards First Nations women and girls. Because Aboriginal women have been associated with images of the "Indian princess" and "Squaw"
some non-Indigenous people believe that Aboriginal women are dirty,
promiscuous, overtly sexualized, which makes these women vulnerable to
violent assaults.
Colonial culture has been foundation of these stereotypes creating a
relationship of violence and hatred, which justifies the treatment of
First Nations peoples to this day.
The
mainstream media makes a lot of money-making movies that play along
with stereotypes; while accurate portrayals may be critically acclaimed
they are not often made or widely distributed.
Overcoming stereotypes
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) made efforts to improve the portrayals of Aboriginal people in its television dramas. Spirit Bay, The Beachcombers, North of 60 and The Rez
used Native actors to portray their own people, living real lives and
earning believable livelihoods in identifiable parts of the country.
Imagining Indians
is a 1992 documentary film produced and directed by American Indian
filmmaker Victor Masayesva, Jr. (Hopi). The documentary attempts to
reveal the misrepresentation of Indigenous American Indian culture and
tradition in Classical Hollywood films by interviews with different
Indigenous Native American actors and extras from various tribes
throughout the United States.
21st century
Reel Injun is a 2009 Canadian documentary film directed by Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge, and Jeremiah Hayes that explores the portrayal of American Indians in film. Reel Injun
is illustrated with excerpts from classic and contemporary portrayals
of Native people in Hollywood movies and interviews with filmmakers,
actors and film historians, while director Diamond travels across the
United States to visit iconic locations in motion picture as well as
American Indian history.
Reel Injun explores many stereotypes about natives in film, from the Noble savage to the Drunken Indian. It profiles such figures as Iron Eyes Cody,
an Italian American who reinvented himself as a Native American
on-screen. The film also explores Hollywood's practice of using Italian
Americans and American Jews to portray Indians in the movies and reveals
how some Native American actors made jokes in their native tongue on
screen when the director thought they were simply speaking gibberish.
Inventing the Indian
is a 2012 BBC documentary first broadcast on 28 October on BBC 4
exploring the stereotypical view of Native Americans in the United
States in cinema and literature.
The American animated series Molly of Denali, which premiered in 2019, features protagonists, actors, co-creators who are Alaskan Native,
with the goal of educating children about informational text as well as
debunking Native stereotypes. The show has been celebrated as "the
nation’s first widely distributed children’s program featuring an Alaska
Native as the lead character."
Watershed delineation is the process of identifying the boundary of a watershed, also referred to as a catchment, drainage basin,
or river basin. It is an important step in many areas of environmental
science, engineering, and management, for example to study flooding,
aquatic habitat, or water pollution.
The activity of watershed delineation is typically performed by
geographers, scientists, and engineers. Historically, watershed
delineation was done by hand on paper topographic maps,
sometimes supplemented with field research. In the 1980s, automated
methods were developed for watershed delineation with computers and
electronic data, and these are now in widespread use.
Map
of the watershed of the Lost Creek Reservoir in Morgan County, Utah,
United States, showing the major streams in blue and the watershed
boundary in red.
Computerized methods for watershed delineation use digital elevation
models (DEMs), datasets that represent the height of the earth's land
surface. Computerized watershed delineation may be done using
specialized hydrologic modeling software such as WMS, Geographic Information System software like ArcGIS or QGIS, or with programming languages like Python or R.
Watersheds are a fundamental geographic unit in hydrology,
the science concerned with the movement, distribution, and management
of water on Earth. Delineating watersheds may be considered an
application of hydrography,
the branch of applied sciences which deals with the measurement and
description of the physical features of oceans, seas, coastal areas,
lakes and rivers. It is also related to geomorphometry,
the quantitative science of analyzing land surfaces. Watershed
delineation continues to be an active area of research, with scientists
and programmers developing new algorithms and methods, and making use of
increasingly high-resolution data from aerial or satellite remote sensing.
Manual watershed delineation
The conventional method of finding a watershed boundary is to draw it by hand on a paper topographic map, or on a transparent overlay. The watershed area can then be estimated using a planimeter,
by overlaying graph paper and counting grid cells, or the result can be
digitized for use with mapping software. The same process can be done
on a computer, sketching the watershed boundary (with a mouse or stylus)
over a digital copy of a topographic map. This is referred to as "heads up digitizing" or "on-screen digitizing."
Example
of an idealized watershed boundary, drawn on a topographic map with
elevation contours. Any precipitation that falls inside the watershed
boundary will flow toward the watershed outlet at the bottom.
For "manual" watershed delination, one must know how to read and
interpret a topographic map, for example to identify ridges, valleys,
and the direction of steepest slope.
Even in the computer era, manual watershed delineation is still a
useful skill, in order to check whether watersheds generated with
software are correct.
Instructions for manual watershed delineation can be found in
some textbooks in geography or environmental management, in government
pamphlets, or in online video tutorials.
According to the US Geological Survey, there are 5 steps to manual watershed delineation:
Find the point of interest along a stream on the map. This is the "watershed outlet" or "pour point."
Imagine or draw surface water flow lines that point downhill
perpendicular to the topographic contours (this is the steepest
direction).
Mark the location of topographical high points (peaks) around the stream.
Mark the points along contours that divide flows towards or away from the stream (ridges).
Connect the dots to delineate the watershed.
General Rules:
The watershed boundary should be perpendicular to contour lines where it crosses them.
The watershed boundary must not cross rivers or streams other than
at the outlet. (In some cases, a blue line representing a man-made canal
or pipeline may traverse your watershed boundary.)
The watershed boundary should run along ridgelines and connect high points.
One disadvantage to manual watershed delineation is that it is
subject to errors and the individual judgment of the analyst. The
Illinois Environmental Protection Agency wrote, "bear in mind that
delineating a watershed is an inexact science. Any two people, even if
both are experts, will come up with slightly different boundaries."
Especially for smaller watersheds and when accurate results are
important, field reconnaissance may be needed to find features that are
not shown on maps. "Going out into the field allows you to identify
human alterations, such as road ditches, storm sewers and culverts that
could change the direction of waters flow and thus change the watershed
boundaries."
Automated or computerized watershed delineation
Using
computer software to delineate watersheds can be much faster than
manual methods. It may also be more consistent, as it removes analyst's
subjectivity. Automatic methods of watershed delineation have been in
use since the 1980s, and are now in widespread use in the science and
engineering communities. Researchers have even used computer methods to
delineate watersheds on Mars.
Automated watershed delineation methods use digital data of the earth's elevation, a Digital Elevation Model,
or DEM. Typically, algorithms use the method of "steepest slope" to
calculate the flow direction from a grid cell (or pixel) to one of its
neighbors.
It is possible to use DEMs in different formats for watershed delineation, such as a Triangular Irregular Network (TIN), or Hexagonal tiling however most contemporary algorithms make use of a regular rectangular grid.
In the 1980s and 1990s, digital elevation models were often obtained by
scanning and digitizing the contours on paper topographic maps, which
were then converted to a TIN or a gridded DEM. More recently, the DEM is obtained by aerial or satellite remote sensing, using stereophotogrammetry, lidar, or radar.
To use a rectangular grid DEM for watershed delineation, it must
first be processed or "conditioned" in order to return realistic
results.
The result is sometimes referred to as a "hydro-enforced" DEM or a
"HydroDEM." Most of the software packages listed below can perform these
functions on a "raw" DEM, or analysts can download
hydrologically-conditioned DEMs such as the near-global HydroSHEDS, MERIT-Hydro, or EDNA for the continental United States. The usual steps for hydrologic conditioning of a DEM are:
Fill sinks.
"Burn in" the stream channels.
Calculate flow direction.
Calculate flow accumulation.
3D
rendering of a hydrologically-conditioned digital elevation model. This
example from the U.S. Geological Survey shows “walling” or “fencing”
using data from the Watershed Boundary Dataset (WBD) and “burning” of
streams from the National Hydrography Dataset (NHDPlus).
Additionally, some methods allow for "fencing ridgelines" and burning in flow pathways through lakes. Some methods also enforce a small slope onto flat areas so that flow will continue to move toward the outlet.
The step of "burning in" stream channels involves artificially
deepening the channel, by subtracting a large elevation value from
pixels that represent the channel. This ensures that once flow has
entered the channel, it will stay there rather than jumping out and
flowing overland or into another channel. Some algorithms infer the
location of channels automatically from the DEM. Better results are
usually obtained by burning in mapped stream channels, or channels
derived from satellite or aerial imagery.
There are several different algorithms available for calculating
flow direction from a DEM. The first method, introduced by Australian
geographers O'Callaghan and Mark in 1984, is referred to as D8.
Water flows from a pixel to one of 8 possible directions to a
neighboring cell (including diagonally), based on the direction of
steepest slope. There are disadvantages to this method as water flow is
limited to 8 directions, separated by 45°, which may result in
unrealistic flow patterns. Also, because all of the flow is routed in
one direction, the D8 method is unable to model situations where the
flow diverges, such as on convex hillsides, in a river delta, or in branched or braided rivers. Alternative algorithms have been proposed and implemented to overcome this limitation, such as D∞. Nevertheless, the D8 algorithm remains in widespread use, and has been used to create important datasets such as HydroBasins and MERIT-Basins.
Computerized watershed delineation is not always correct. Some
errors stem from incorrectly placing the watershed outlet on the digital
river network, or "snapping the pour point."
Another class of errors stems from inaccuracies in the digital terrain
data, or where its resolution is too coarse to capture flow pathways.
In general, DEMs with higher spatial resolution can more realistically
describe topography of the land surface and flow direction. However,
there is a tradeoff, as a finer grid with more pixels increases
computing time.
Nevertheless, even high-resolution data may not adequately capture flow
pathways in complex environments like cities and suburbs, where flow is
directed by curbs, culverts, and storm drains. Finally, some errors can result from the algorithm or the choice of parameters.
Because errors are common, some authorities insist that the
results of automated delineation must be carefully checked. The US
Geological Survey's standards for the US Watershed Boundary Dataset
allow the use of software "to generate intermediate or “draft” boundary
lines," which then must be verified by the analyst by overlaying them on
a computer display over basemaps (scanned topographic maps, aerial
photographs) to verify their accuracy.
Software for watershed delineation
Some of the first watershed delineation software was written in FORTRAN, such as CATCH and DEDNM.
Watershed delineation tools are a part of several Geographic Information System software packages such as ArcGIS, QGIS, and GRASS GIS.
There are standalone programs for watershed delineation such as TauDEM.
Watershed delineation tools are also incorporated into some hydrologic
modeling software packages.
Software developers have also published libraries or modules in
several languages (see list below). Many of these packages are free and
open source, which means they can be expanded or adapted by those
willing and able to write or modify code. Finally, there are web
applications for delineating watersheds. Some of these web apps have
extra features for science and engineering like calculating flow
statistics or watershed land cover types (e.g.: StreamStats, Model My
Watershed).
Standalone watershed delineation software
TauDEM, Toolbox for ArcGIS, or command line executable for Windows.
TOPAZ, from the US Department of Agriculture, Windows executable.
Hydrologic Modeling Software with Watershed Delineation Capability
Stream Stats, from the US Geological Survey, allows you to delineate watersheds in the US only
Model My Watershed, by the Stroud Water Research Center, US only, can delineate watersheds based on an outlet point, and perform analyses related to water quality
Ontario Watershed Information Tool, for the province of Ontario in Canada
Vector datasets of pre-delineated watersheds
There
are a number of vector datasets representing watersheds as polygons
that can be displayed and analyzed with GIS or other software. In these
datasets, the entire land surface is divided into "subwatersheds" or
"unit catchments." Individual unit watersheds can be combined or merged
to find larger watersheds. The unit catchments have linked hydrological code data or similar metadata to create a flow network, so flow pathways and connections can be determined via network analysis.
Watershed Boundary Dataset Subregions Map for the United States, created by the US Geological Survey
This list is non-exhaustive, as many organizations and territories
have produced their own watershed map data and have published via the
web. Notable datasets include:
United States Watershed Boundary Dataset, website (continually updated)
Canadian National Hydrographic Network Watershed Boundaries, website
The historical painting The Death of General Wolfe
(1771) features a noble-savage Indian observing the behaviours of
civilized British soldiers facing the battlefield death of their
commanding officer. (Benjamin West; detail)
In Western anthropology, philosophy, and literature, the noble savage is a stock character
who is uncorrupted by civilization. As such, the noble savage
symbolizes the innate goodness and moral superiority of a primitive
people living in harmony with Nature. In the heroic drama of the stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672), John Dryden represents the noble savage as an archetype of Man-as-Creature-of-Nature.
The intellectual politics of the Stuart Restoration (1660–1688) expanded Dryden's playwright usage of savage to denote a human wild beast and a wild man. Concerning civility and incivility, in the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699), the philosopher Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, said that men and women possess an innate morality, a sense of right and wrong conduct, which is based upon the intellect and the emotions, and not based upon religious doctrine.
In the philosophic debates of 17th-century Britain, the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit was the Earl of Shaftesbury's ethical response to the political philosophy of Leviathan (1651), in which Thomas Hobbes defended absolute monarchy and justified centralized government as necessary because the condition of Man in the apolitical state of nature
is a "war of all against all", for which reason the lives of men and
women are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" without the
political organization of people and resources. The European Hobbes gave
as example the American Indians as people living in the bellicose state of nature that precedes tribes and clans organizing into the societies that compose a civilization.
In 18th-century anthropology the term noble savage then denoted nature's gentleman, an ideal man born from the sentimentalism of moral sense theory. In the 19th century, in the essay "The Noble Savage" (1853) Charles Dickens rendered the noble savage into a rhetorical oxymoron by satirizing the British romanticisation of Primitivism in philosophy and in the arts made possible by moral sentimentalism.
In many ways, the noble savage notion entails fantasies about the
non-West that cut to the core of the conversation in the social
sciences about Orientalism, colonialism and exoticism. The key question
that emerges here is whether an admiration of "the Other" as noble
undermines or reproduces the dominant hierarchy, whereby the Other is
subjugated by Western powers.
Origins
In
the essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), about the Tupinambá people of Brazil,
the philosopher Michel de Montaigne introduced the noble savage
(nature's gentleman) as a stock character in the stories of Europeans' relations with the non-European Other.
16th century
The stock character of the noble savage originated from the essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), about the Tupinambá people of Brazil, wherein the philosopher Michel de Montaigne presents "Nature's Gentleman", the bon sauvage counterpart to civilized Europeans in the 16th century.
The playwright John Dryden coined the term "noble savage" in the stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672).
17th century
The first usage of the term noble savage in English literature occurs in John Dryden's stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards
(1672), about the troubled love of the hero Almanzor and the Moorish
beauty Almahide, in which the protagonist defends his life as a free man
by denying a prince's right to put him to death, because he is not a
subject of the prince:
I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
In the poem "An Essay on Man" (1734), the poet Alexander Pope developed the noble savage into the non-European Other. (Jonathan Richardson, c. 1736)
18th century
By the 18th century, Montaigne's predecessor to the noble savage, nature's gentleman was a stock character usual to the sentimental literature
of the time, for which a type of non-European Other became a background
character for European stories about adventurous Europeans in the
strange lands beyond continental Europe. For the novels, the opera, and
the stageplays, the stock of characters included the "Virtuous Milkmaid"
and the "Servant-More-Clever-Than-the-Master" (e.g. Sancho Panza and Figaro), literary characters who personify the moral superiority of working-class people in the fictional world of the story.
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, a humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.
To the English intellectual Pope, the American Indian was an abstract being unlike his insular European self; thus, from the Western perspective of "An Essay on Man", Pope's metaphoric usage of poor
means "uneducated and a heathen", but also denotes a savage who is
happy with his rustic life in harmony with Nature, and who believes in deism, a form of natural religion — the idealization and devaluation
of the non-European Other derived from the mirror logic of the
Enlightenment belief that "men, everywhere and in all times, are the
same".
The Noble savage: In the royal coat of arms of Denmark, the wild men (woodwose) who support the royal house date from the early reign of the Oldenburg dynasty.
19th century
Like Dryden's noble savage term, Pope's phrase "Lo, the Poor
Indian!" was used to dehumanize the natives of North America for
European purpose, and so justified white settlers' conflicts with the
local Indians for possession of the land. In the mid-19th century, the
journalist-editor Horace Greeley
published the essay "Lo! The Poor Indian!" (1859), about the social
condition of the American Indian in the modern United States:
I have learned to appreciate better
than hitherto, and to make more allowance for the dislike, aversion,
contempt wherewith Indians are usually regarded by their white
neighbors, and have been since the days of the Puritans. It needs but
little familiarity with the actual, palpable aborigines to convince
anyone that the poetic Indian — the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow
— is only visible to the poet's eye. To the prosaic observer, the
average Indian of the woods and prairies is a being who does little
credit to human nature — a slave of appetite and sloth, never
emancipated from the tyranny of one animal passion, save by the more
ravenous demands of another.
As I passed over those magnificent bottoms of the Kansas, which form the reservations of the Delawares, Potawatamies,
etc., constituting the very best corn-lands on Earth, and saw their
owners sitting around the doors of their lodges at the height of the
planting season, and in as good, bright planting weather as sun and soil
ever made, I could not help saying: "These people must die out — there
is no help for them. God has given this earth to those who will subdue
and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against His righteous
decree."
Moreover, during the American Indian Wars
(1609–1924) for possession of the land, European white settlers
considered the Indians "an inferior breed of men" and mocked them by
using the terms "Lo" and "Mr. Lo" as disrespectful forms of address. In
the Western U.S., those terms of address also referred to East Coast
humanitarians whose noble-savage conception of the American Indian was
unlike the warrior who confronted and fought the frontiersman.
Concerning the story of the settler Thomas Alderdice, whose wife was
captured and killed by Cheyenne Indians, The Leavenworth, Kansas, Times and Conservative
newspaper said: "We wish some philanthropists, who talk about
civilizing the Indians, could have heard this unfortunate and almost
broken-hearted man tell his story. We think [that the philanthropists]
would at least have wavered a little in their [high] opinion of the Lo
family."
Cultural stereotype
The Roman Empire
In Western literature, the Roman book De origine et situ Germanorum (On the Origin and Situation of the Germans, AD 98), by the historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus, introduced the anthropologic concept of the noble savage to the Western World; later a cultural stereotype who featured in the exotic-place tourism reported in the European travel literature of the 17th and the 18th centuries.
Al-Andalus
The 12th-century Andalusian novel The Living Son of the Vigilant (Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, 1160), by the polymath Ibn Tufail, explores the subject of natural theology as a means to understand the material world. The protagonist is a wild man
isolated from his society, whose trials and tribulations lead him to
knowledge of Allah by living a rustic life in harmony with Mother
Nature.
Kingdom of Spain
In the 15th century, soon after arriving to the Americas in 1492, the Europeans employed the term savage to dehumanise the indigènes (noble-savage natives) of the newly discovered "New World" as ideological justification for the European colonization of the Americas, called the Age of Discovery (1492–1800); thus with the dehumanizing stereotypes of the noble savage and the indigène, the savage and the wild man
the Europeans granted themselves the right to colonize the natives
inhabiting the islands and the continental lands of the northern, the
central, and the southern Americas.
The conquistador mistreatment of the indigenous peoples of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (1521–1821) eventually produced bad-conscience recriminations amongst the European intelligentsias for and against colonialism. As the Roman Catholic Bishop of Chiapas, the priest Bartolomé de las Casas witnessed the enslavement of the indigènes
of New Spain, yet idealized them into morally innocent noble savages
living a simple life in harmony with Mother Nature. At the Valladolid debate
(1550–1551) of the moral philosophy of enslaving the native peoples of
the Spanish colonies, Bishop de las Casas reported the noble-savage
culture of the natives, especially noting their plain-manner social etiquette and that they did not have the social custom of telling lies.
Kingdom of France
In the intellectual debates of the late-16th and the 17th centuries, philosophers used the racist stereotypes of the savage and the good savage as moral reproaches of the European monarchies fighting the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) and the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). In the essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), Michel de Montaigne reported that the Tupinambá people
of Brazil ceremoniously eat the bodies of their dead enemies, as a
matter of honour, whilst reminding the European reader that such wild man behavior was analogous to the religious barbarism of burning at the stake: "One calls ‘barbarism’ whatever he is not accustomed to." The academic Terence Cave further explains Montaigne's point of moral philosophy:
The cannibal practices are admitted
[by Montaigne] but presented as part of a complex and balanced set of
customs and beliefs which "make sense" in their own right. They are
attached to a powerfully positive morality of valor and pride, one that
would have been likely to appeal to early modern codes of honor, and
they are contrasted with modes of behavior in the France of the wars of
religion, which appear as distinctly less attractive, such as torture and barbarous methods of execution.
As philosophic reportage, "Of Cannibals" applies cultural relativism to compare the civilized European to the uncivilized noble savage. Montaigne's anthropological report about cannibalism in Brazil indicated that the Tupinambá people were neither a noble nor an exceptionally good folk,
yet neither were the Tupinambá culturally or morally inferior to his
contemporary, 16th-century European civilization. From the perspective
of Classical liberalism of Montaigne's humanist portrayal of the customs of honor of the Tupinambá people indicates Western philosophic
recognition that people are people, despite their different customs,
traditions, and codes of honor. The academic David El Kenz explicates
Montaigne's background concerning the violence of customary morality:
In his Essais ...
Montaigne discussed the first three wars of religion (1562–63; 1567–68;
1568–70) quite specifically; he had personally participated in [the
wars], on the side of the [French] royal army, in southwestern France.
The [anti-Protestant] St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
[1572] led him to retire to his lands in the Périgord region, and
remain silent on all public affairs until the 1580s. Thus, it seems that
he was traumatized by the massacre. To him, cruelty was a criterion
that differentiated the Wars of Religion [1562–1598] from previous
conflicts, which he idealized. Montaigne considered that three factors
accounted for the shift from regular war to the carnage of civil war:
popular intervention, religious demagogy, and the never-ending aspect of
the conflict. ...
He chose to depict cruelty through the image of hunting, which
fitted with the tradition of condemning hunting for its association with
blood and death, but it was still quite surprising, to the extent that
this practice was part of the aristocratic
way of life. Montaigne reviled hunting by describing it as an urban
massacre scene. In addition, the man–animal relationship allowed him to
define virtue, which he presented as the opposite of cruelty. ... [As] a sort of natural benevolence based on ... personal feelings.
Montaigne associated the [human] propensity to cruelty toward animals,
with that exercised toward men. After all, following the St.
Bartholomew's Day massacre, the invented image of Charles IX shooting
Huguenots from the Louvre Palace
window did combine the established reputation of the King as a hunter,
with a stigmatization of hunting, a cruel and perverted custom, did it
not?
Literature
In the stageplay Oroonoko: A Tragedy (1696), by Thomas Southerne, plot complications lead the protagonist Oroonoko to kill his beloved Imoinda.
The themes about the person and persona of the noble savage are the subjects of the novel Oroonoko: Or the Royal Slave (1688), by Aphra Behn, which is the tragic love story between Oroonoko and the beautiful Imoinda, an African king and queen respectively. At Coramantien, Ghana, the protagonist is deceived and delivered into the Atlantic slave trade (16th–19th centuries), and Oroonoko becomes a slave of plantation colonists in Surinam
(Dutch Guiana, 1667–1954). In the course of his enslavement, Oroonoko
meets the woman who narrates to the reader the life and love of Prince
Oroonoko, his enslavement, his leading a slave rebellion against the Dutch planters of Surinam, and his consequent execution by the Dutch colonialists.
Despite Behn having written the popular novel for money, Oroonoko proved to be political-protest literature against slavery, because the story, plot, and characters followed the narrative conventions of the European romance novel. In the event, the Irish playwright Thomas Southerne adapted the novel Oroonoko into the stage playOroonoko: A Tragedy (1696) that stressed the pathos
of the love story, the circumstances, and the characters, which
consequently gave political importance to the play and the novel for the
candid cultural representation of slave-powered European colonialism.
Uses of the stereotype
Romantic primitivism
In the 1st century AD, in the book Germania, Tacitus ascribed to the Germans the cultural superiority of the noble savage way of life, because Rome was too civilized, unlike the savage Germans. The art historian Erwin Panofsky explains that:
There had been, from the beginning of Classical speculation, two contrasting opinions about the natural state of man,
each of them, of course, a "Gegen-Konstruktion" to the conditions under
which it was formed. One view, termed "soft" primitivism in an
illuminating book by Lovejoy and Boas, conceives of primitive life as a
golden age of plenty, innocence, and happiness — in other words, as
civilized life purged of its vices. The other, "hard" form of
primitivism conceives of primitive life as an almost subhuman existence
full of terrible hardships and devoid of all comforts — in other words,
as civilized life stripped of its virtues.
— Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition (1936)
In the novel The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (1699), in the “Encounter with the Mandurians” (Chapter IX), the theologian François Fénelon presented the noble savage stock character in conversation with civilized men from Europe about possession and ownership of Nature:
On our arrival upon this coast we found there a savage race who ... lived by hunting and by the fruits which the trees spontaneously produced. These people ...
were greatly surprised and alarmed by the sight of our ships and arms
and retired to the mountains. But since our soldiers were curious to see
the country and hunt deer, they were met by some of these savage
fugitives.
The leaders of the savages accosted them thus: “We abandoned for
you, the pleasant sea-coast, so that we have nothing left, but these
almost inaccessible mountains: at least, it is just that you leave us in
peace and liberty. Go, and never forget that you owe your lives to our
feeling of humanity. Never forget that it was from a people whom you
call rude and savage that you receive this lesson in gentleness and
generosity. ... We abhor that brutality which, under the gaudy names of ambition and glory, ... sheds the blood of men who are all brothers. ...
We value health, frugality, liberty, and vigor of body and mind: the
love of virtue, the fear of the gods, a natural goodness toward our
neighbors, attachment to our friends, fidelity to all the world,
moderation in prosperity, fortitude in adversity, courage always bold to
speak the truth, and abhorrence of flattery. ...
If the offended gods so far blind you as to make you reject peace, you
will find, when it is too late, that the people who are moderate and
lovers of peace are the most formidable in war.”
— Encounter with the Mandurians, The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (1699)
In the 18th century, British intellectual debate about Primitivism used the Highland Scots as a local, European example of a noble savage people, as often as the American Indians were the example. The English cultural perspective scorned the ostensibly rude manners of the Highlanders, whilst admiring and idealizing the toughness of person and character of the Highland Scots; the writer Tobias Smollett described the Highlanders:
They greatly excel the Lowlanders
in all the exercises that require agility; they are incredibly
abstemious, and patient of hunger and fatigue; so steeled against the
weather, that in traveling, even when the ground is covered with snow,
they never look for a house, or any other shelter but their plaid, in
which they wrap themselves up, and go to sleep under the cope of heaven.
Such people, in quality of soldiers, must be invincible. . . .
Whatsoever therefore is consequent
to a time of War, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is
consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than
what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them
withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the
fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no
Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no
commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things
as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account
of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all,
continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man,
solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
— Leviathan
In the Kingdom of France, critics of Crown and Church risked
censorship and summary imprisonment without trial, and primitivism was
political protest against the repressive imperial règimes of Louis XIV and Louis XV. In his travelogue of North America, the writer Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce de Lahontan, Baron de Lahontan, who had lived with the Huron Indians (Wyandot people), ascribed deist and egalitarian politics to Adari, a Canadian Indian who played the role of noble savage for French explorers:
Adario sings the praises of Natural Religion. ... As against society, he puts forward a sort of primitive Communism, of which the certain fruits are Justice and a happy life. ...
[The Savage] looks with compassion on poor civilized man — no courage,
no strength, incapable of providing himself with food and shelter: a
degenerate, a moral cretin, a figure of fun in his blue coat, his
red hose, his black hat, his white plume and his green ribands. He
never really lives, because he is always torturing the life out of
himself to clutch at wealth and honors, which, even if he wins them,
will prove to be but glittering illusions. ...
For science and the arts are but the parents of corruption. The Savage
obeys the will of Nature, his kindly mother, therefore he is happy. It
is civilized folk who are the real barbarians.
— Paul Hazard, The European Mind
Interest in the remote peoples of
the Earth, in the unfamiliar civilizations of the East, in the untutored
races of America and Africa, was vivid in France in the 18th century.
Everyone knows how Voltaire and Montesquieu
used Hurons or Persians to hold up the [looking] glass to Western
manners and morals, as Tacitus used the Germans to criticize the society
of Rome. But very few ever look into the seven volumes of the Abbé Raynal's History of the Two Indies,
which appeared in 1772. It is however one of the most remarkable books
of the century. Its immediate practical importance lay in the array of
facts which it furnished to the friends of humanity in the movement
against negro slavery. But it was also an effective attack on the Church and the sacerdotal system. ...
Raynal brought home to the conscience of Europeans the miseries which
had befallen the natives of the New World through the Christian
conquerors and their priests. He was not indeed an enthusiastic preacher
of Progress. He was unable to decide between the comparative advantages
of the savage state of nature
and the most highly cultivated society. But he observes that "the human
race is what we wish to make it", that the felicity of Man depends
entirely on the improvement of legislation, and ... his view is generally optimistic.
— J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: an Inquiry into its Origins and Growth
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was critical of government indifference to the Paxton Boys massacre of the Susquehannock in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in December 1763. Within weeks of the murders, he published A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County,
in which he referred to the Paxton Boys as "Christian white savages"
and called for judicial punishment of those who carried the Bible in one
hand and a hatchet in the other.
When the Paxton Boys led an armed march on Philadelphia in February 1764, with the intent of killing the MoravianLenape and Mohican who had been given shelter there, Franklin recruited associators including Quakers to defend the city, and led a delegation that met with the Paxton leaders at Germantown
outside Philadelphia. The marchers dispersed after Franklin convinced
them to submit their grievances in writing to the government.
In his 1784 pamphlet Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America, Franklin especially noted the racism inherent to the colonists using the word savage as a synonym for indigenous people:
"Savages" we call them, because
their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of
civility; they think the same of theirs.
Franklin praised the way of life of indigenous people, their customs
of hospitality, their councils of government, and acknowledged that
while some Europeans had foregone civilization to live like a "savage",
the opposite rarely occurred, because few indigenous people chose
"civilization" over "savagery".
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) by Allan Ramsay (1766)
Like the Earl of Shaftesbury in the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699), Jean-Jacques Rousseau
likewise believed that Man is innately good, and that urban
civilization, characterized by jealousy, envy, and self-consciousness,
has made men bad in character. In Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men (1754), Rousseau said that in the primordial state of nature, man was a solitary creature who was not méchant (bad), but was possessed of an "innate repugnance to see others of his kind suffer."
Moreover, as the philosophe of the Jacobin radicals of the French Revolution (1789–1799), ideologues accused Rousseau of claiming that the noble savage was a real type of man, despite the term not appearing in work written by Rousseau; in addressing The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1923), the academic Arthur O. Lovejoy said that:
The notion that Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality
was essentially a glorification of the State of Nature, and that its
influence tended to wholly or chiefly to promote “Primitivism” is one of
the most persistent historical errors.
In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau said
that the rise of humanity began a "formidable struggle for existence"
between the species man and the other animal species of Nature. That under the pressure of survival emerged le caractère spécifique de l'espèce humaine, the specific quality of character, which distinguishes man from beast, such as intelligence capable of "almost unlimited development", and the faculté de se perfectionner, the capability of perfecting himself.
Having invented tools, discovered fire, and transcended the state
of nature, Rousseau said that "it is easy to see. . . . that all our
labors are directed upon two objects only, namely, for oneself, the
commodities of life, and consideration on the part of others"; thus amour propre
(self regard) is a "factitious feeling arising, only in society, which
leads a man to think more highly of himself than of any other."
Therefore, "it is this desire for reputation, honors, and preferment
which devours us all . . . this rage to be distinguished, that we own
what is best and worst in men — our virtues and our vices, our sciences
and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers — in short, a vast
number of evil things and a small number of good [things]"; that is the
aspect of character "which inspires men to all the evils which they
inflict upon one another."
Men become men only in a civil society based upon law, and only a
reformed system of education can make men good; the academic Lovejoy
explains that:
For Rousseau, man's good lay in
departing from his "natural" state — but not too much; "perfectability",
up to a certain point, was desirable, though beyond that point an evil.
Not its infancy but its jeunesse [youth] was the best age of the
human race. The distinction may seem to us slight enough; but in the
mid-eighteenth century it amounted to an abandonment of the stronghold
of the primitivistic
position. Nor was this the whole of the difference. As compared with
the then-conventional pictures of the savage state, Rousseau's account,
even of this third stage, is far less idyllic; and it is so because of
his fundamentally unfavorable view of human nature quâ human. ...
[Rousseau's] savages are quite unlike Dryden's Indians: "Guiltless men,
that danced away their time, / Fresh as the groves and happy as their
clime" or Mrs. Aphra Behn's natives of Surinam,
who represented an absolute idea of the first state of innocence
"before men knew how to sin." The men in Rousseau's "nascent society"
already had 'bien des querelles et des combats" [many quarrels and
fights]; l'amour propre was already manifest in them ... and slights or affronts were consequently visited with vengeances terribles.
Rousseau proposes reorganizing society with a social contract that will "draw from the very evil from which we suffer the remedy which shall cure it"; Lovejoy notes that in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau:
declares that there is a dual
process going on through history; on the one hand, an indefinite
progress in all those powers and achievements which express merely the
potency of man's intellect;
on the other hand, an increasing estrangement of men from one another,
an intensification of ill-will and mutual fear, culminating in a
monstrous epoch of universal conflict and mutual destruction. And the
chief cause of the latter process Rousseau, following Hobbes and
[Bernard] Mandeville, found, as we have seen, in that unique passion of the self-conscious animal — pride, self esteem, le besoin de se mettre au dessus des autres
[the need to put oneself above others]. A large survey of history does
not belie these generalizations, and the history of the period since
Rousseau wrote lends them a melancholy verisimilitude. Precisely the two
processes, which he described have ...
been going on upon a scale beyond all precedent: immense progress in
man's knowledge and in his powers over nature, and, at the same time, a
steady increase of rivalries, distrust, hatred and, at last, "the most
horrible state of war" ... [Moreover, Rousseau] failed to realize fully how strongly amour propre tended to assume a collective form ... in pride of race, of nationality, of class.
Charles Dickens
In 1853, in the weekly magazine Household Words, Charles Dickens published a negative review of the Indian Gallery cultural program, by the portraitist George Catlin, which then was touring England. About Catlin's oil paintings of the North American natives, the critic Charles Baudelaire said that "He [Catlin] has brought back alive the proud and free characters of these chiefs; both their nobility and manliness."
For European art collectors, the American portraitist George Catlin painted idealized representations of the North American noble savage. (William Fisk, 1849)The Noble Savage as stereotype: Sha-có-pay, Chief of the Ojibwa Indians of the Great Plains. (George Catlin, 1832)
Despite European idealization of the noble savage as a type of
morally superior man, in the essay “The Noble Savage” (1853), Dickens
expressed repugnance for the American Indians and their way of life,
because they were dirty and cruel and continually quarrelled among
themselves. In the satire of romanticised primitivism
Dickens showed that the painter Catlin, the Indian Gallery of portraits
and landscapes, and the white people who admire the idealized American
Indians or the bushmen of Africa are examples of the term noble savage used as a means of Othering a person into a racialist stereotype. Dickens begins by dismissing the noble savage as not being a distinct human being:
To come to the point at once, I beg
to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider
him a prodigious nuisance and an enormous superstition. . . .
I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a
savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the
Earth. . . .
The noble savage sets a king to reign over him, to whom he submits his
life and limbs without a murmur or question, and whose whole life is
passed chin deep in a lake of blood; but who, after killing incessantly,
is in his turn killed by his relations and friends the moment a grey
hair appears on his head. All the noble savage's wars with his
fellow-savages (and he takes no pleasure in anything else) are wars of
extermination — which is the best thing I know of him, and the most
comfortable to my mind when I look at him. He has no moral feelings of
any kind, sort, or description; and his "mission" may be summed up as
simply diabolical.
Dickens ends his cultural criticism by reiterating his argument against the romanticized persona of the noble savage:
To conclude as I began. My position
is that if we have anything to learn from the Noble Savage it is what
to avoid. His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his
nobility, nonsense. We have no greater justification for being cruel to
the miserable object, than for being cruel to a WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE or
an ISAAC NEWTON; but he passes away before an immeasurably better and
higher power than ever ran wild in any earthly woods, and the world will
be all the better when this place [Earth] knows him no more.
Theories of racialism
In 1860, the physician John Crawfurd and the anthropologist James Hunt identified the racial stereotype of the noble savage as an example of scientific racism, yet, as advocates of polygenism — that each race
is a distinct species of Man — Crawfurd and Hunt dismissed the
arguments of their opponents by accusing them of being proponents of
"Rousseau's Noble Savage". Later in his career, Crawfurd re-introduced
the noble savage term to modern anthropology, and deliberately ascribed coinage of the term to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Modern perspectives
Opponents of primitivism
In War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996), the archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley said that the "widespread myth" that "civilized humans have fallen from grace from a simple, primeval happiness, a peaceful golden age"
is contradicted and refuted by archeologic evidence that indicates that
violence was common practice in early human societies. That the noble savage paradigm has warped anthropological literature to political ends. Moreover, the anthropologist Roger Sandall likewise accused anthropologists of exalting the noble savage above civilized man, by way of designer tribalism, a form of romanticised primitivism that dehumanises Indigenous peoples into the cultural stereotype of the indigène peoples who live a primitive way of life demarcated and limited by tradition, which discouraged Indigenous peoples from cultural assimilation into the dominant Western culture.
Supporters of primitivism
In
"The Prehistory of Warfare: Misled by Ethnography" (2006), the
researchers Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli challenged the idea
that the human species is innately bellicose, and that warfare is an
occasional activity by a society, but is not an inherent part of human
culture. Moreover, the UNESCO's Seville Statement on Violence (1986) specifically rejects claims that the human propensity towards violence has a genetic basis.
Anarcho-primitivists, such as the philosopher John Zerzan, rely upon a strong ethical dualism between Anarcho-primitivism and civilization;
hence, "life before domestication [and] agriculture was, in fact,
largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual
equality, and health."
Zerzan's claims about the moral superiority of primitive societies are
based on a certain reading of the works of anthropologists, such as Marshall Sahlins and Richard Borshay Lee, wherein the anthropologic category of primitive society is restricted to hunter-gatherer societies who have no domesticated animals or agriculture, e.g. the stable social hierarchy
of the American Indians of the north-west North America, who live from
fishing and foraging, is attributed to having domesticated dogs and the
cultivation of tobacco, that animal husbandry and agriculture equal
civilization.
In anthropology, the argument has been made that key tenets of
the noble-savage idea inform cultural investments in places seemingly
removed from the Tropics, such as the Mediterranean and specifically
Greece, during the debt crisis by European institutions (such as
documenta) and by various commentators who found Greece to be a positive
inspiration for resistance to austerity policies and the neoliberalism
of the EU
These commentators' positive embrace of the periphery (their
noble-savage ideal) is the other side of the mainstream views, also
dominant during that period, that stereotyped Greece and the South as
lazy and corrupt.
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