Talk:Noble savage/Archive 1

History of American Indians
Isn't one of the primary uses of this term that referring to American Indians as worthy of friendship and of conversion to christianity? --Schwael 15:48, 8 December 2005 (UTC)


 * No, quite the contrary in fact. Christianity and railroads and silk top hats and duchesses and popes are all signs of decadence from the original fine simplicity of the instinctively noble savage. That's the germ of the idea: and it is only a dream-idea, not a fact of ethnology. --Wetman 22:24, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Modern denial
A good citation would probably be The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, which offers an excellent review of the history of this idea. --User:ianrickard 05:44, 19 December 2005


 * Could you edit into the article the mainstream flow of the idea of the noble savage as Pinker lays it out? This article needs some structure and reports from some professional assessments. --Wetman 17:23, 19 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Is it the history of the idea we want here? I'm personally more interested in orientating the article more around the evidence that supports and refutes this concept. I think the literary examples are important because they show how pervasive the idea has been, but they seem to be making up the bulk of article at the moment. --User:ianrickard 22:20, 20 December 2005


 * Of course it's the history of the idea. There's no fact to report about "noble savages"! It's an idea whose time has come ...and gone! Quotes show how the idea has been received and expressed: Wikipedia readers are less interested in what nosotros think of "noble savage". Inspect the subtext and contemporary context of a series of quotes, and bingo! you've got the article right there. --Wetman 22:20, 20 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I think many of the examples in there are rather uninteresting and there's much more to be said about how the idea has become embedded in manyh people's notions of how humans behaved ancestrally, how it ties in with socialism, anthropologists allegedly manipulating data or misinterpeting observations from various cultures in order to match their allegiance or otherwise to this idea, etc. There's a load of stuff connected with Margaret Mead and Napoleon Chagnon that's still controversial. User:ianrickard 23:02, 20 December 2005

Teal'c would probably count as a "noble savage," although he is a little too sophisticated in my mind to fit such a stereotype. Worf? NO WAY!

Let's go through the list of characteristics from the article:

Living in harmony with Nature - FALSE. Worf is a starfleet officer, a highly technological character. Generosity, fidelity and selflessness - FALSE. Worf is honourable, but he is quite capable of demonstrating selfishness and other negative traits; see, for example, the episode in which he withholds life-saving and harmless donations from a patient just because that patient is a Romulan.

Innocence - FALSE. Worf, again, is honourable, but many of the plots deal with the issues of guilt he faces as a result of his divided background.

Inability to lie - FALSE. Worf chooses not to mostly, but he has himself said that he admires guile, which may sometimes include lying for a certain reason.

Physical health, disdain of luxury - TRUE, but this is due to his background as a Klingon.

Moral courage - TRUE.

"Natural" intelligence or innate, untutored wisdom - NONSENSE! Worf's wisdom is from normal education, albeit of a different form to ours today.

I am not going to remove this reference from the page as I am no anthropologist. AS a layman, however, it seems to me that Worf does NOT fit the stereotype.Johno 13:47, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

I absolutely agree with this assessment of Worf. I also removed the reference to Conan as a Caucasian-- his race is totally irrelevant. Make a big deal out of Tarzan's race if you want; that is worth noting because historically Caucasian civilizations were not in jungles. Implying that Conan's race is somehow improper in his setting is inappropriate.

RfC
I have started an RfC on the usage of the term "barbarian" at wikipedia. Please leave your opinion on this matter HERE<< link. - WeniWidiWiki 19:48, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

...oh. and if we forbid "savage" too, will we have to delete this page? Are many other terms likely to be forbidden? How about Fool? That's certainly "pejorative." --Wetman 23:02, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Caliban
Hi -- I'm intrigued by the notion that it's "anachronistic" to cast Caliban as a noble savage, since Shakespeare draws so heavily on Montaigne's essay "Of the Cannibals," which (to me at least) sounds very much like a precursor of the noble savage idea as discussed in this article... I didn't want to edit anything b/c I thought others might know more about the subject than I, but I do think it's worth further consideration. What say others? Gotterfunken 18:47, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Frankenstein's monster, mentioned in the same breath, is also confusing. In the intro, he "embodies the ideal" of the noble savage, but later on, it's an anachronism to recast him as one.


 * Confusing is right. Whoever wrote that Caliban respresents the ideal of the "noble savage" must have meant that Caliban was meant as a critique of the ideal of the "noble savage", since Caliban, a hideous would-be rapist, is the complete antithesis of nobility. In fact, Caliban is an example of what A.O. Lovejoy (who has studied this at length) calls "hard primitivism", the notion, expressed by most famously in the 17th century by Hobbes, that "savage" or "uncivilized" people are depraved and have lives that are rough, brutish, and short. Hobbes's categorical dismissal of primitive peoples as being wholly depraved was contested in the Eighteenth century by Shaftesbury and many others (whose ideas, contrary to contrast how they are popularly depicted, actually agreed with most of the rest of Hobbes's world view). Subsequent Eighteenth century sentimental portrayals of indigenous peoples and those who lived a simple life were written in opposition to Hobbes's absolutist statements.


 * Rousseau and Shaftesbury did not claim that man was naturally good, only that, in common with animals, he was not naturally bad but rather neither good nor bad -- insofar as (along with many animals), he was capable of a degree of empathy --"sympathy" as Schiller calls it in his "Ode to Joy" (Adam Smith made empathy the basis of his "Ethics" and modern science with its discovery of "mirror neurons" confirms this). Both Rousseau and Shaftebury claimed that even Hobbes would have conceded this point.24.105.152.153 (talk) 19:14, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Topic sentence

 * 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.

The very first sentence of the article should tell me exactly what a Noble savage is, rather than that it was considered more worthy than whatever else. Oddity- (talk) 09:32, 8 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Actually, the first sentence in this entry is not only vague but also completely mistaken. "Primitivism" was not by any means an eighteenth century cult. The notion that life in simpler times, or in the past, or among indigenous peoples, was best or more virtuous, i.e., what has been termed "Soft Primitivism", was ubiquitous in antiquity and is even found in the Bible, equally ubiquitous was its counterpart "Hard Primitivism" -- or the notion that things are or were worse in the past or among people deprived of the comforts and luxuries of civilization. This has been an ongoing debate in recorded Western literature for thousands of years, as A.O. Lovejoy and George Boas and their students have amply documented in, among other books, the definitive study, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1935, 1962), which is available on Amazon.


 * What was a really a "cult" in the eighteenth century was that of sentiment -- for elucidation on this topic, see wiki entries at sentiment and also the Sentimental Novel. The cult of sentiment included the trope of the sentimental primitive, among numerous other types, see Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1934). In French 18th C. literature -- in the novels of Diderot and others, the wise or good "sauvage" (wild man) makes his appearance chiefly as a way to safely criticize the absolutism of the monarchy or the Church at a time when more direct criticism was punishable by jail (Diderot did go to jail, anyway). There was no "noble savage" in French literature. (The article also completely fails to define "noble", but never mind).


 * Yes, it's a "stereotype" (as the commenter below points out) or recurring figure, let's be clear. It is also an oxymoron, and hence satirical. Thus the term not neutral but is virtually always used in a dismissive or derogatory way.Mballen (talk) 15:04, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Hard primitivists, those who thought life in antiquity was harsher or more brutal than now, also sometimes felt that was better because it made men stronger and tougher. Among ancient writers, "soft primitivists" located the lost Golden Age in Arcadia in Greece -- "that particular not overly opulent, region of central Greece, Arcady, came to be universally accepted as an ideal realm of perfect bliss and beauty, a dream incarnate of ineffable happiness, surrounded nevertheless with a halo of 'sweetly sad' melancholy" (see Erwin Panovsky's famous article, "Et In Arcadia Ego" [www.voice.se/blanketter%5Ctalbok%5CTPB_Manus_Humaniora_eng.pdf]). This idea was satirized by the 17th century English poet Samuel Butler (a hard primitivist), who wrote:

"The old Arcadians that could trace""Their pedigree from race to race""Before the moon, were once reputed""Of all the Grecians the most stupid""Whom nothing in the world could bring""To civil life but fiddling."

The first "noble savage" was probably the wild man of the woods, Enkidu, in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh c. 2700 B.C. The "wild man" was a stock figure in Medieval literature. In French the term was "le bon sauvage" which means the good wild man -- sort of like the "the hermit good" who lives in the wood. In the French language "sauvage" means wild, as in a wild flower. It has no connotations of fierceness, as in English. The idea that Rousseau invented the noble savage is false. He was accused of this by people who disliked his ideas, however, particularly those critical of the idea of equality. In his book The Myth of the Noble Savage, Ter Ellinson has shown that the derogatory phrase "Rousseau's Noble Savage" and the talk about the 18th century "cult" of primitivism began to be used in 1865 after the Sepoy rebellion by so-called "scientific" racists in order to justify British imperialism, white supremacy, and the enslavement of colonial peoples. As the most outspoken defender of human equality Rousseau has had to be punished ever since and I guess these people are still with us.Mballen (talk) 03:30, 11 February 2009 (UTC)February 2009

As it's supposed to be a STEREOTYPE, there ARE not as many. As such, the definition in itself makes sense. It is percieved, it's not an actual description of what Native American are supposed to be like.

However, as for myself I highly disagree with the term. It's mainly used to critisize anyone who doesn't want to conform to the doctrine that humanity is bad in itself and can only be forced to behave halfway okay by sheer force.

It is of course hard to not fall in stereotypes in a movie. Not so long ago, in movies girls where usually depicted playing with dolls, learning how to cook and not caring that much about advanced education. Now, the stereotype has shifted. Most usually, it's girls portraied as ambitious and educated, while boys are being portraied as loud, happy-go-lucky and full of temper. Still, it is a stereotype, since it doesn't even portray the girls as as lucky and overconfident as educated boys are, and boys not as playing with dolls, laughing sillily and learning how to cook, but simply, if in a different way, reinforced with girls being passive, quiet, sensitive and obedient and boys being active, loud, overconfident and making their own laws. Still, I don't think that portraying (not as a stereotype, just as individuals since girls are as individual as boys) girls as clever is per se a stereotype.

Also, it is true that, however wise and close to nature they might be or have been, some of the tribes HAVE been violent and war-like. So the depiction of Indian Americans of entirely pacifist or peaceful is not true. BUT don't forget the setting! It's the EUROPEANS who have took over their country and massacred a lot of them, NOT the opposite! They have always only defied themselves! And if it needs some movies somebody'd claim to be depictions of "Noble Savages" to convince us that they are HUMANS and ought to have HUMAN RIGHTS just like we do, then so BE it!

Also, let's not forget that, while some tribes have become highly patriarchal and violent due to their hard life, others who are completely PACIFIST and PEACEFUL (!!!!!) DO (!!!!!!) exist. Most notably the Inuit. They were shocked when they saw sailors beating each other, and supposed they mistook each other for non-human animals! Also, they were shocked as they saw settlers beating their children. WHO is savage there, huh? NOT the Inuit. Well, now perhaps- THANKS to collonization! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.62.41.11 (talk) 05:32, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Section needs to be added on Charles Dickens's sarcastic the use of the phrase
At some point in the nineteenth century the trope of the indigenous man and his simpler way of life ceased figure as a moral reproach to the decadence of civilized Europe as it had previously done. Instead, industrial civilization now appeared to decisively highlight the inferiority of the indigene, whose way of life, even his admirers believed, now appeared headed for certain extinction.

In 1851 Charles Dickens wrote a scathingly critical review in Household Words of painter George Caitlin's show of American Indians when it visited England. In his essay, Dickens expressed repugnance for Indians and their way of life, in no uncertain terms, recommending that they ought to be "civilized out of existence". Dickens's scorn for those who, like Caitlin, he alleged, misguidedly exalted the so-called "noble savage" was limitless. In reality, Dickens maintaine, Indians were dirty, cruel, and constantly fighting among themselves. This satirical attack on Caitlin, and others like him who might find something to admire in the American Indians, is a notable turning point in the history of the use of the phrase "noble savage".Mballen (talk) 06:06, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Montaigne and the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew
Someone deleted the section on Montaigne's Essay "On Cannibals" and its context as a commentary on the barbarity of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. Perhaps it was simply vandalism, but I am assuming whoever did it may have been offended for religious reasons. Therefore I have restored it and and also tried to adjust the tone to make it less POV-appearing, if possible, as wel as including such references as I could find. It should be kept in mind that Montaigne was a Catholic, and Catholics as well as Protestants were quite appalled by the violence. I myself visited a Catholic church in Autun, Burgundy, with a monument to the Catholic mayor of that town who ordered his townspeople not to participate in the killings.

I believe it is quite generally recognized that Montaigne's essay on cannibals is written with the wars of religion in mind.

The following are excerpts from an essay by David El Kenz about Montaigne's analysis of barbarity in "On Cannibals" as a reaction to the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, which can be found on the very interesting website Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence:

The Western notion of massacre first appeared in France during the Wars of Religion. At the time, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre represented the ultimate model of an outburst of extreme violence against defenseless civilians. . . . Compared to contemporary massacres, the historical distance that separates us from the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre makes it easier to apprehend it retrospectively as an event, that is, as an absolute and irreparable break in historical continuity. However, historical methods of research entail putting facts into perspective, and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre must be evaluated in the light of existing practices of religious violence at the time. Thus, the contextualization approach is necessary in order to preclude anachronistic interpretations of massacres; yet we must also consider its limitations, so as to avoid trivializing this massacre and in effect, disregarding its unique character as an event. "...Though the scope of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre was unprecedented, in fact, it was not the first massacre of the French Wars of Religion. Murderous violence first reached a peak at the beginning of the first civil war; according to the Protestant writer Agrippa d’Aubigné, Huguenots were massacred in thirty towns at that time. François de La Noue claimed that during the interval of inter-religious coexistence, from 1563 to 1567, 3,000 of his fellow Protestants were massacred. However, the Huguenots also perpetrated acts of mass murder, such as in La Michelade, Nîmes, where 80 “papists” were killed on September 30, 1567. Yet as the Protestant Louis Micqueau stated in 1563, Catholics rather tended to sacrifice flesh-and-blood persons, whereas Protestants tended to settle for destroying stone images." Between 1559 and 1571, according to a series of 58 massacres recorded in Jean Crespin’s 1614 Histoire des Martyrs (History of the Martyrs) and in L’Histoire ecclésiastique (Ecclesiastical History, published in 1580), the region of Provence experienced the highest number of killings (62.7%), with the Loire valley as a distant second (8.5%), followed by Languedoc (5.2%), Champagne (4.6%), and Guyenne and Poitou (4.6%). This geography of massacres corresponds to the areas that experienced the most intense fighting. One-third of the slaughter took place when a city was captured. In Tours for example, the Huguenots took the city on April 2, 1562 and looted its churches. During its re-conquest by the royal forces, on July 11, the city’s Catholic inhabitants took revenge by tying 200 Huguenots back to back, and drowning them in the Loire River. The concentration of massacres in the South was linked to the exceptional urban density of the region, to the size of its Protestant community and to the violence of the military conflict in the region. Conversely, Brittany experienced no killings at all: Protestants were a minority there and its Catholic governor, the duke of Etampes, kept a moderate stance and prevented fratricidal fighting from breaking out. Appalled by the excesses of the civil war, some well-known figures renounced violence in spite of their political commitments. In his Essais, first published in 1580, the French writer Montaigne discussed the first three wars of religion (1562-63; 1567-68; 1568-70) quite specifically; he had personally participated in them, on the side of the royal army, in southwestern France. The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre 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 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. In his essay “Des Cannibales,” Montaigne analyzed the notion of barbarity. He compared cannibalism among the Tupinamba people of Brazil, to the Stoics’ practice of eating decaying meat, and to the acts of violence committed during the Wars of Religion. In reference to Jean de Léry’s History of Brazil (Histoire du Brésil, 1578), the humanist Montaigne concluded that barbarity is always denounced as some other people’s custom. Moreover, all things considered, Native Americans were less cruel that the Europeans and the Ancients, he added, because their cannibal practices were highly ritualized, limited to defensive warfare and did not satisfy a taste for human flesh. Henceforth, massacres during the Wars of Religion are an inescapable reference in the understanding of human history; consequently, they justify historical comparisons that, in fact, demystify the superiority of both ancient and modern civilizations. In this work, Montaigne set out a hierarchy of different evils, opposing the Native Americans’ cannibalism, associated with revenge, and the cruel Portuguese custom of burying a prisoner up the waist, before shooting him full of arrows, and then hanging his body. Accordingly, he asserted that truthful discourse is based on putting massacres into perspective, in order to transcend the “voix commune” (“common voice” or voice of the people, of our passions), through the “voye de la raison,” the voice of reason.Mballen (talk) 07:21, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
 * The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre: a foundational event
 * Revisiting the context
 * The hazards of trivialization and anachronism

The Noble Savage in popular culture
I think there ought to be a separate section or even a spinoff article on the use of the Noble Savage stereotype in books and films. There are some examples here & there in this article, but there's enough material out there to warrant having it organized separately. What do you think? The Sanity Inspector (talk) 23:57, 6 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Ter Ellingson has argued that applying the label "noble savage" to such examples is very subjective and tends also to be reductive and unhelpful, not to say POV, as for example, in the painting of the Indian by Benjamin West. Therefore, if there is to be such a spinoff I suggest it be labeled "Romantic primitivism" or "romantic naturalism" and not "noble savage"173.77.96.17 (talk) 07:02, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay, that's cool. We could still have Noble Savage redirect to such an article. The Sanity Inspector (talk) 12:50, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Not Noble - just savage
This article about the Noble Savage concept is fine. But why no contrasting page on just 'Savage'?

Are men living 'in a state of nature' really noble or at they just savages?

If the idea of nobilty amongst savages is just fashionable romantic tosh then the the opposite must be true - that savages exist(ed) and were/are just plain savage i.e. wild primates quite different from domesticated and civilised man.

Some moral philosphy questions need raising - since if savages were/are truly savage then are there legitimate moral arguments for asserting that civilised man and his culture is 'better' than savage man? The arguments have clearly changed over time.

My own guess is that since we seldom if ever encounter real savages any more that we don't and can't quite understand what a 'savage' was and looked like to civilised Europeans a century or more ago.

No doubt a true savage varied somewhat between the 'noble savage' on one hand and the 'murderous, ignorant and brutal savage' on the other. My own guess would be that any 'nobility' of the savage life has been grossly distorted and inflated by time, distance, guilt and romanticism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.4.125.209 (talk) 10:56, 14 January 2011 (UTC)


 * The problem is that "noble" and "savage" are relative terms like "north" and "south", which have meaning in relation to something else. If you are going to discuss the meaning of "savage" you would have to do likewise with "noble". How many nobles do you meet who are truly "noble". Real people are a mixture of qualities. As far as civilization being "better", many people have pointed out that as our capacities for improvement have increased there is also a capacity for increased suffering and destruction.Mballen (talk) 17:30, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Original sin
I think it needs to be mentionned somehow that the idea of the noble savage had tremendous repercussion on Western Philosophy. In Christian doctrine, humans are born with the orignal sin and religion is what guides them to know what is right and what is wrong. But there we are one day, Europe is colonizing America, a continent that could not have known the Christian religion. On this new continent, Europeans find human beings living there and they have their own morality and they don't live in perpetual sin. Something is not right. Aren't they supposed to be killing, raping and eating each other all the time? There goes Rousseau one day writing that the human being is born good and that civilization is what makes him vicious. -- Mathieugp 19:49, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Actually, all Christian apologetics is rooted on the belief that there exists in all cultures an independent moral code, for which is borrowed the term "Tao." (Lewis, Mere Christianity). The statement that the "Noble Savage" theory disproves the doctrine of original sin is naive, backwords, and appalling.

What some theologians have objected to in the idea that man is either "naturally" good", that is capable of improvement (i.e., becoming good) on his own without the help of God's grace, or of improving society by their own unaided efforts, is called the heresy of Pelagianism Hardline anti-Pelagianists believe that the majority of mankind is foredoomed to eternal damnation and nothing they can do will change that fact. This is called the doctrine of Predestination, which was held by Calvin and his followers. The discovery of tribal people living in the New World who had never heard of Christianity inspired many new debates about Pelagianism. Many eighteenth century writings which idealize primitive peoples, were in fact intended to counter the theory Predestination, which was held to be excessively cruel. By the middle of the 18th c. even most Calvinist had given up Predestination. In New England, many Calvinists became Unitarians.Mballen (talk) 19:04, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

Opponents of Primitivism
I see that "[a]n editor has expressed a concern that this article lends undue weight to certain ideas relative to the article as a whole." That's generous. This needs help.

E.g. the paragraph starting "Casting their net rather indiscriminately, self-styled anti-primitivists have disparaged books, genres, and protagonists ..." etc. etc. which discusses criticisms of more than a half dozen works, includes no citations of said criticisms whatsoever, and concludes that "[t]hese criticisms often display the fallacy of Presentism (judging works of the past by the standards of today)." I'm not aware of a deductive "fallacy of Presentism."

This section reads like an English 101 essay and should be rewritten entirely with a less biased voice. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.17.21.32 (talk) 04:39, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

The citation are the quotes in the articles.173.56.192.102 (talk) 05:00, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

This paragraph actually deals with "Primitivism" and opponents to that. Primitivism has its own Wikipedia page and this paragraph should probably go on that page, as it does not actually deal with the term "noble savage" specifically but with "primitivism" in general. I kindly ask for that paragraph to be moved. --87.145.2.98 (talk) 21:08, 10 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Um, no. The wikipedia entry on "primitivism" actually deals with primitivism in art, not primitivism in the history of ideas. Noble savage is an aspect of what historians of ideas call "soft primitivism" when it is about an ideal or golden age that is better than the present, or "hard primitivism" when it is thought that it was more noble to be tough and strong and resourceful as idealized primitives were thought to be. Mballen (talk) 05:31, 6 December 2011 (UTC)Mballen (talk) 06:29, 6 December 2011 (UTC)


 * For the fallacy of Presentism, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis) Mballen (talk) 06:29, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Last section
Motion Pictures== ==

The final section of the article: ===Motion pictures=== The idea of the noble savage is sometimes used by film industry. In this case, usually the philosophical background is not deep; sometimes it is just a simple supply of the story.

makes no sense: "a simple supply of the story" (????). "used by the film industry". It also lacks any citations and is in the form of a list, which I understand is frowned on in wikipedia.

I guess the editor meant to say that idealized primitives or "others" still appear in movies, especially those based on popular genre fiction, such as science fiction.

I also don't see how the fact that someone called the Hell's Angels "noble savages" fits in with the article.

One could also say that "anti-primitivist" themes are also found in movies, such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and Lord of the Flies. Mballen (talk) 00:10, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Quotes and refs
Hello, everyone. I am not a scholar on this subject; I am but a mere copyeditor who respects the incredible amount of insight and intellect and care which went into this article. I noticed that the quotations were provided in an inconsistant way, so I started converting them into a modern format. In the process, I improved some citations, but I may have done a little too much. I don't know. There are *enormous* anchors in this article, which may be some kind of academic convention for all I know. On wikipedia, content should ideally be synthesized into the article body; and, maybe someone just didn't have the time or wherewithal to do that. I just thought I'd state my intentions, and I defer to the group. Here is the bulk of my diffs, or just look for my name in the history. Thank you for such an enlightening volume.

Smuckola (talk) 03:40, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

noble savage in the arts
The should be a section on the appearance "noble savages" in art as it is an important theme/motif used in some famous books, paintings, movies, etc. --Kmhkmh (talk) 01:05, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

What is a noble savage?
This article is hard to read with its many box quotes, but I can't find where it discusses the attributes of a noble savage. It is a stock character right? but this article is about racist ideas and primitivism, but noble savage is not necessarily a racist idea. For example: many of Sir Walter Scott's noble savage characters were Scottish Highlanders, as well as Anglo-Saxons. 71.194.44.209 (talk) 04:41, 16 March 2014 (UTC) Scottish Highlanders were not Anglo-Saxon, but Celtic. Scott was a Lowlander, and somewhere described himself as a "Sassenach". An English person was then called a "Southron".

"Savage", when Dryden wrote, could and often did mean "wild animal". Just try that meaning in Dryden's phrase, remembering also Ovid's description of the creation of man at the beginning of the Metamorphoses-- sanctius his animal, mentisque capacius altae, deerat adhuc, et quod dominari in cetera posset,

or (George Sandys)

The nobler creature, with the mind possest, Was wanting yet, that should command the rest. Dryden has been misunderstood and his words misused. Seadowns (talk) 11:17, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

A slight confusion of Scottish terminology.

'Sassenach' is strictly a Scottish Gaelic word literally meaning 'Saxon' i.e. Any Anglo-Saxon or English-speaking person from south of the Gaelic-speaking Highlands.

'Southron' is simply an archaic Scottish (and English) spelling of Southern or Southerner, a word often used (historically) by the English-speaking Scottish lowlanders to refer to their southern neighbours in England, whom they also of course more usually called English.

Confusingly Sassenach is now commonly used in both the highlands and lowands of Scotland to refer to the English. Cassandra. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.149.166.127 (talk) 09:02, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Challenge: 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury
In the lead section: "The idea that humans are essentially good is often attributed to the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury"

Not only is this uncited, I also believe it to be quite Eurocentric in nature; many Indian, Arabic, and Chinese philosophers disseminated these ideas among their communities (Confucianism comes to mind) long before some noble official from Great Britain. Unless a citation can be found, I find this section to do vastly more harm in terms of accuracy, rhetoric, and messaging than benefit. Augend (drop a line) 04:24, 26 April 2022 (UTC)


 * I'd say go ahead and remove it or change it to say that he introduced it specifically into European thinking; we can search for a source after potentially misleading, unsourced material is removed, as you said. There's always time to reintroduce the information if sources are found. --YuriNikolai (talk) 23:14, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

Legitimate claims
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.

I can't figure out what this means. 68.239.78.86 (talk) 22:29, 8 March 2009 (UTC)


 * @68.239.78.86 it is indeed quite unclear. I say we remove this unless a specific example can be brought Augend  (drop a line) 23:15, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

White Savages
In the lead, it says that the noble savage is a character "who personifies the imaginary indigène as the non-white Other who is uncorrupted by civilization". However, there are plenty of examples of white noble savages, even in this very article! The idea is that civilization is bad is much more important than race. Vikings, for example, are often depicted as noble savages. 2A01:C22:34B4:E700:210A:8529:5490:F9A6 (talk) 18:21, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Oroonoko, Aphra Behn inaccuracy
Imoinda is not actually European and has been his love interest before being sold into slavery. Also, Coramantien is supposedly a fictional country, not confirmed to be located in Ghana. 82.21.205.86 (talk) 04:06, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Benjamin Franklin
This section has been extensively revised and citations added. It previously contained statements that were misleading or not backed by reliable sources. The unsupported claim that he "had good relations with American Indians during the French and Indian War" wrongly suggests that Franklin had substantial contact with indigenous people at this time. In fact, Franklin spent most of the war in England.

When the Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia in 1764, Franklin organized the defence. Among the associators were some members of the Quaker community, however, it was not a "Quaker militia." Nor was the purpose of the associators to "temper and control racial violence" or "police the entire colonial community." Once the Paxton Boys agreed to return to their homes the associators also dispersed. Griffin&#39;s Sword (talk) 14:54, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Good stuff
"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” –A. O. Lovejoy, “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, ” Modern Philology Vol. 21, No. 2 (Nov., 1923):165-186

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-8232(192311)21%3A2%3C165%3ATSPOR%22%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W.

(This essay may also be found in A. O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas [Naltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948]) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.250.30.152 (talk) 16:22, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

The "Noble Savage" is a rhetorical trope (and derogatory term) used as a strawman to attack those who questioned Western imperialism and scientific racism. Of course, all scholars know that Rousseau never refers to the Noble Savage or anything like it in any of his works, but like the proverbial zombie, the canard that he invented the concept dies hard. In his book, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of Californsia Press, 2001), anthropologist Ter Ellingson has shown convincingly that no one has ever believed in the Noble Savage. (You can see that this is true from the justified objections of posters below that the examples cited in the article do not really fit into the category of the Noble Savage.) Ellingson shows how after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1861 (really 1857), two so-called "Scientific" racists, Crawfurd and Hunt took over the British Ethnographic society by castigating anyone who defended the human rights of native peoples as sentimental believers in "Rousseau's Noble Savage", as they put it. Ellingson believes that to this day anthropologists have internalized these criticisms. The idea that positive portrayals of indigenous people represent a supposed form of paternalistic patronizing is another variation on this theme.

"If Rousseau was not the inventor of the Noble Savage, who was?" writes Ellingson, One who turns for help to [Hoxie Neale] Fairchild's 1928 study*, a compendium of citations from romantic writings on the "savage" may be surprised to find [his book] The Noble Savage almost completely lacking in references to its nominal subject. That is, although Fairchild assembles hundreds of quotations from ethnographers, philosophers, novelists, poets, and playwrights from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, showing a rich variety of ways in which writers romanticized and idealized those who Europeans considered "savages", almost none of them explicitly refer to something called the "Noble Savage". Although the words, always duly capitalized, appear on nearly every page, it turns out that in every instance, with four possible exceptions, they are Fairchild's words and not those of the authors cited.(Ellingson, 2001, p. 4).

The fact is that any remotely positive portrayal of an indigenous (or working class) person is apt to be characterized (out of context) as a supposedly "unrealistic" or "romanticized" Noble Savage. Ellingson points out that Fairchild includes as an example of a supposed "Noble Savage", a picture of a Negro slave on his knees, lamenting his lost freedom. According to Ellingson, Fairchild ends his book with a denunciation of the (un-named) believers in Primitivism or "The Noble Savage" -- whom he feels are threatening to unleash the dark forces of irrationality on civilization. (Ellingson, p. 380). Note than in the article here a picture of an American Indian is shown as an example of a Noble Savage, presumably because the Indian in question is depicted as handsome or idealized. It may be that the painter painted everyone he painted that way and not just Indians, as was usual during the Romantic (c. 1800 to 1860), as opposed to the "realistic", period in painting but there is no way we can find this out. 96.250.138.19 (talk) 23:38, 8 October 2008 (UTC)


 * The paragraphs about Lescarbot should come out. He was only saying ironically that the savages were noble, because they were able to hunt. He was not saying they were noble in any real sense. Also there is not the slightest reason to think Dryden got his phrase from that book. He was a coffee-house wit, not an anthropologist, and his phrase is a conceit, meaning "wild animal nobler than the other wild animals" (taken from Ovid). "Savage" could mean "wild animal". Esedowns (talk) 14:53, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
 * As a further point, surely the reference to the "merciless Indian savages" in the Declarations of Independence should be mentioned somewhere? They were considered anything but noble. (I like to mention this on 4th July!} Esedowns (talk) 10:33, 4 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Hoxie Neale Fairchild The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism, New York, 1928.

Souldn't Savage Noble(from Beast Machines) be at least mentioned here, as his name is likely a reference to the 'noble savage', and he has the right character traits, at least to an extent.Seven-point-Mystic 12:57, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

I feel as if it should be pointed out that the Noble Savage did not want to fight, but would when needed. There is a lot of explanation of how "noble" the Noble Savage is, but I do not see this point addressed anywhere. Kthacker1 (talk) 01:24, 6 December 2016 (UTC)


 * I don’t think that is a general rule. People have different ideas of what is noble and often project them on noble savages. For example, if the author of a work thinks bravery is noble, then the savage might be depicted as brave. 2A01:C22:34B4:E700:210A:8529:5490:F9A6 (talk) 18:30, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

The content of these two paragraphs appears to be well off the topic of the "noble savage" and more appropriate to a general discussion of critiques of western imperialism. If anyone has an idea where these paragraphs might fit better, please move them. Rossami 18:56, 28 Oct 2003 (UTC)
 * There are no more "neolithic" people on this planet; the word "primitive" does not refer to people living in a former stage in cultural evolution, it refers to people who are at the periphery of the world capitalist economy who have been, are, or are about to be victims of Western colonial or imperialist expansion, ethnocide, and genocide.
 * There have been some -- many, but not all, anthropologists, and many non-anthropologists -- who developed a critique of European ethnocentrism, and sought to develop more objective understandings of non-Western peoples. They continue to challenge the presumption of European (or Western) superiority, and to challenge specific claims made by Westerners concerning human nature and the world in which humans live and act. Those who are committed to the superiority of the West and Western ideas, colonialism, ethnocide and genocide, are profoundly threatened by such attempts.


 * The modern use of such terms as "neolithic" may be as doomed by time and study as suich terms as "primitive". Cultures around the world did not simultaneously abandon tool use.Kortoso 20:25, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I think it is ridiculous to classify Robert E. Howard's Conan as a a 'noble savage.' Conan is a Barbarian and a plunderer; a criminal who holds to few scruples. He is admired for his strength and brutality alone, and adheres to next to zero of those attributes listed. (Chalk one up for physical health and sexual inhibition, which includes the attempted rape written in Howard's The Frost Giant's Daughter.) To consider Conan the Barbarian as morally superior to civilized man is inane. Conan's ignoble desires are primarily lust, wealth, and battle.


 * To me, Tarzan and Conan are both portrayed as being superior because they are from outside civilization, and often they triumph by mere virtue of that "noble" birth. Isn't that the essence of the noble savage myth? Montaigne was one of those who influenced Rousseau, and in particular his essay "On Cannibals".


 * Whether that means that they behave in a way that we expect them to, when confronted with civilization, may be a matter of our own expectations. I am inspired to write an essay citing the Cimmerian's "rough code" of honor using specific examples.--Kortoso 20:51, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I think that is a good point. There are variations of the theme. However, sometimes a noble savage is not pure noble savage. Especially if the author doesn’t fully buy into the idea that civilization is bad or that people are naturally good. Conan may be inspired by other noble savage characters, but has more in common with Dumas´ 3 Musketeers. 2A01:C22:34B4:E700:210A:8529:5490:F9A6 (talk) 18:36, 9 February 2023 (UTC)