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Noble savage
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In the eighteenth-century cult of "Primitivism" the noble savage, uncorrupted by the influences of civilization, was considered more worthy, more authentically noble than the contemporary product of civilized training.
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In the eighteenth-century cult of "Primitivism" the noble savage, uncorrupted by the influences of civilization, was considered more worthy, more authentically noble than the contemporary product of civilized training. Although the phrase noble savage first appeared in Dryden's The Conquest of Granada (1672), the idealized picture of "nature's gentleman" was an aspect of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, among other forces at work.
The term "noble savage" expresses a concept of the universal essential humanity as unencumbered by civilization; the normal essence of an unfettered human. Since the concept embodies the idea that without the bounds of civilization, humans are essentially good, the basis for the idea of the "noble savage" lies in the doctrine of the goodness of humans, expounded in the first decade of the century by Shaftesbury, who urged a would-be author “to search for that simplicity of manners, and innocence of behaviour, which has been often known among mere savages; ere they were corrupted by our commerce” (Advice to an Author, Part III.iii). His counter to the doctrine of original sin, born amid the optimistic atmosphere of Renaissance humanism, was taken up by his contemporary, the essayist Richard Steele, who attributed the corruption of contemporary manners to false education.
The concept of the noble savage has particular associations with Romanticism and with Rousseau's Romantic philosophy in particular. The opening sentence of Rousseau's Emile (1762), which has as its subtitle "de l'Éducation ("or, Concerning Education") is
- “Everything is good in leaving the hands of the Creator of Things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
In the later eighteenth-century, the published voyages of Captain James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville seemed to open a glimpse into an unspoiled Edenic culture that still existed in the unspoiled and un-Christianized South Seas. By 1784 it was so much an accepted element in current discourse that Benjamin Franklin could mock some of its inconsistencies in Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America (1784). Among the classics of the "natural" education, the novel Paul et Virginie appeared in 1787 and Chateaubriand's sentimental romance Atala appeared in 1807.
The concept appears in many further books of the early nineteenth century. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein forms one of the better-known examples: her monster embodies the ideal. German author Karl May employed the idea extensively in his Wild West stories. Aldous Huxley provided a later example in his novel Brave New World (published in 1932).
Origins
The attributes of the "noble savage" often included:
- Living in harmony with Nature
- Generosity and selflessness
- Innocence
- Inability to lie, fidelity
- Physical health
- Disdain of luxury
- Moral courage
- "Natural" intelligence or innate, untutored wisdom
In the first century CE, all of these features of the eighteenth century Noble Savage had been attributed by Tacitus to Germans in his Germania, in which he contrasted them repeatedly with the softened, romanized, corrupted Gauls— and by inference criticized his own Roman culture in unspoken contrasts.
Another origin for the concept of the "noble savage" was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, an Arabic philosophical novel by Ibn Tufail, a 12th-century Islamic philosopher. The plot revolves around a feral child, Hayy, who is raised by an animal on a desert island and grows up to become an autodidactic philosopher, before eventually making contact with civilization. 17th-century English translators developed the character Hayy into a symbol for the "idea of the Noble Savage," which appeared "amidst universal doubts concerning the validity of social ethics".
Criticism
In the 20th century, the concept of the Noble Savage came to be seen as unrealistic and condescending. Insofar as it was based on certain stereotypes, it came to be considered a form of patronizing racism, even when it replaced the previous stereotype of the bloodthirsty savage. It has been criticized by many, for example Roger Sandall, in academic, anthropological, sociological and religious fields.
Stanley Kubrick, a film director, rejects the idea of the noble savage:
As a supposed form of racism, the ideology of the noble savage has been criticized by anthropologists who claim that it is a false construct based on European notions of what the "Indian" is like. Archeologist Lawrence H. Keeley has used ethnographic evidence from groups with social structures similar to those of Highland New Guinea tribesman and Kalahari San peoples to demonstrate the level of violence present in these societies. Amongst his aims is to demonstrate the falseness of the myth that "civilized humans have fallen from grace, from a simple primeval happiness, a peaceful golden age." . The author laments the role that the "noble savage" paradigm has had in warping much anthropological literature to political ends. Historically, and in the present, the idea of the noble savage has been used by various parties to create impossible double standards and thus deny indigenous groups their legitimate claims.
Literature
The noble savage as protagonist or, more often, as companion to the protagonist has long been a popular type of literary character. Perhaps the most notable early examples include the character Hayy in Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (12th century), the character Kamil in Ibn al-Nafis' Theologus Autodidactus (13th century), and the character Friday from Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe. Other examples include Dirk Peters from Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), The Noble Savage from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Chingachgook and Uncas from James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales (1823 and later), Queequeg from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Umslpoagaas from H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain (1885), and Winnetou from Karl May´s Winnetou novels (1893 and later). Tonto from the Lone Ranger radio and television programs is one of the best known examples from the 20th century.
Twentieth-century popular culture has also expressed its inherited views of the "noble savage" by placing them in fantasy or science fiction settings. Historical fantasy examples include figures such as "Mowgli", "Tarzan" and "Conan the Barbarian." The very meaning of "barbarian" in contemporary popular culture has become sympathetically colored through similar fantasies.
As sensitivity to racist stereotypes has increased, science fiction has often cast space aliens in the role of the noble savage.
Twentieth-century readers recast as "noble savages" some literary creatures like Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest or Victor Frankenstein's creature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)
Another noble savage archetype appears in the person of the Siberian Nanai hunter Dersu Uzala, who became the main character of the book Dersu Uzala by the Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev. It has inspired two movie pictures, the 1961 Soviet film Dersu Uzala by Agasi Babayan (????? ??????), as well as the 1975 Soviet-Japanese film Dersu Uzala by Akira Kurosawa (?? ?).
In 1964, the Australian writer Mary Durack published a fictionalized account of Yagan, an Indigenous Australian warrior who played a key part in early resistance to British settlement around Perth, Western Australia, in her children's novel The Courteous Savage: Yagan of the Swan River. When reissued in 1976, it was renamed Yagan of the Bibbulmun because the word "Savage" was considered racist.
The 1980 film The Gods Must Be Crazy by Jamie Uys depicts a group of Bushmen from the Kalahari desert as noble savages.
The schizophrenic Columbian Indian "Chief" Bromden in Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was considered by critics to explode the conventions of the noble savage.
See also
Further reading
- Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object
- Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford: University Press, 1996).
- Eric R. Wolf, 1982. Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press)
- Marianna Torgovnick, 1991. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago)
- Ter Ellingson, 2001. The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press)
- Roger Sandall 2001 The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays ISBN 0-8133-3863-8
- Steven Pinker. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking) ISBN 0-670-03151-8
- Fergus M. Bordewich, "Killing the White Man's Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century"
- Robert F. Berkhofer, "The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present"
- Peter C Rollins, "Hollywood's Indian : the portrayal of the Native American in film"
- Vine Deloria, Jr., "The Pretend Indian: Images of Native Americans in the Movies"
- Constant battles: the myth of the peaceful, noble savage / Steven LeBlanc - New York : St Martin's Press, 2003. ISBN 0312310897
External links
- "Primitivism in the Eighteenth Century".
- : The Culture Cult
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