SOURCE: White, Hayden. “The Noble Savage: Theme as Fetish.” In First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, edited by Fredi Chiappelli, pp. 121-35. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

[In the following essay, White discusses the history of the Noble Savage theme, proposing that the concept contains attributes of a fetish in the sense that form is believed to reflect content. White maintains that Europeans not only fetishized native peoples, but fetishized their own culture.]

The theme of the Noble Savage may be one of the few historical topics about which there is nothing more to say. Few of the topoi of eighteenth-century thought have been more thoroughly studied. The functions of the Noble Savage theme in the ideological debates of the age are well-known, its remote origins have been plausibly identified, and what John G. Burke calls its “pedigree” has been precisely established by historians of ideas.¹ Archival research will no doubt turn up new instances of the use of the theme in the imaginative and political literature from the Renaissance to the Romantic period and beyond, but the chances of adding to our understanding of the concept, in any historically significant way, would seem remote. In future studies of eighteenth-century cultural history, the “Noble Savage theme” is likely to be consigned to those footnotes reserved for subjects about which scholars no longer disagree.

Yet in looking over the literature on the Noble Savage theme, one might gain a relatively new insight into its function in eighteenth-century thought by stressing its fetishistic nature. For like the concept of the Wild Man, from which it derives and against which it was ostensibly raised up in opposition, the concept of the Noble Savage has all the attributes of a fetish. And if this is the case, then the Noble Savage idea might be significantly illuminated by being conceived as a moment in the general history of fetishism in which civilized man, no less than primitive man, has participated since the beginning of human time.

In my discussion of the Noble Savage theme as fetish, I shall use the term fetish in three senses.² A fetish is any natural object believed to possess magical or spiritual power. This is the traditional ethnological meaning of the term, and from it derives the conventional figurative use of it to designate any material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence. From this figurative usage, in turn, derives the psychological sense, as indicating any object or part of the body obsessively seized upon (cathected) as an exclusive source of libidinal gratification. From these three usages we derive the three senses of the term fetishism which I use here: belief in magical fetishes, extravagant or irrational devotion, and pathological displacement of libidinal interest and satisfaction to a fetish.

As thus envisaged, fetishism is, at one and the same time, a kind of belief, a kind of devotion, and a kind of psychological set or posture. By considering the Noble Savage theme as a fetish, I hope to show that the very notion of a Noble Savage was, given the historical context in which it was elaborated as a putative description of a type of humanity, fetishistic in nature. That is to say, belief in the idea of a Noble Savage was magical in nature, extravagant and irrational in the kind of devotion it was meant to inspire, and, in the end, displayed the kind of pathological displacement of libidinal interest that we normally associate with the forms of racism that depend on the idea of a “wild humanity” for their justification.

To be sure, expressions such as “Wild Man” and “Noble Savage” are metaphors, and insofar as they were once taken literally, they can be regarded simply as errors, mistakes, or fallacies.³ But the fact is that human culture cannot do without such metaphors, and when we have to identify things that resist conventional systems of classification, they are not only functionally useful but necessary for the well-being of social groups. Metaphors are crucially necessary when a culture or social group encounters phenomena that either elude or run afoul of normal expectations or quotidian experiences.

This is why we must conclude with the anthropologist and the psychologist that there is really nothing inherently “absurd” about either of these types of fetishism. From a scientific point of view, the ascription of spiritual powers to inanimate objects or of the qualities of a whole to its parts may be a mistake, a fallacy of logic or a failure of reason, but both kinds of fetishism are too widespread to be regarded as in themselves pathological and too congenial to commonsense modes of thought to be regarded as inherently vicious or harmful. The social scientist is much more interested in how a given fetishistic practice functions in a given culture, individual, or group, whether it is oppressive or therapeutically efficacious, than in exposing the error of logic or rationality that underlies it. Cultural practice or belief can be adjudged absurd only from within the horizon of expectations marked out by those practices and beliefs that would make it either “unthinkable” or, if thinkable, “unconscionable.” From the standpoint of a truly objective social science, no belief is inherently absurd if it provides the basis for an adequate functioning of the practices based on it within the total economy of the culture in which it is held. And it is here that the very notion of “absurdity” must be linked up with the concept of taboo. For although many cultural practices may be wrong, fallacious, harmful, inefficient, repressive, dehumanizing, and so on, they can be viewed as “absurd” only insofar as they violate some taboo on what is either “thinkable” or “feasible” within a given frame of moral reference.

For example, Marx calls the “money form of value” which takes the form of a “fetishism of gold” absurd because it is based, first, on a mistake (the confusion of the “means” of exchange [money] with the things to be exchanged [commodities with a certain use-value]), and, secondly, on a confusion of a “form” of exchange (commodities) with the “content” of the things exchanged (their labor-value, which gives them their use-value). The “fetishism of gold” is absurd because it leads to the pursuit without end of the most “worthless of commodities” and the denial of the “value” inherent in man's noblest faculty, his capacity to produce by his own labor commodities with specific use-values. But Marx was less interested in castigating the “fetishism of gold” (which, after all, had been done as a matter of course by moralists since the time of Hesiod and the Prophets) than in explicating the logic of this “absurd” belief and the “vicious” practices which it engendered or justified. In the process of this explication, Marx applied nothing less than a logic which he called “dialectical” but which I would call a logic of metaphor, which he took to be the key to the understanding of all forms of fetishism and to that process of alienation by which men psychologically distanced themselves from those things that were ontologically closest to them and turned into idols those that were most removed from their own natures as men. Prior to his analysis of the logic of commodity exchange, Marx set forth a logic of men's thought about commodities, so as to demonstrate how what had started out as a perfectly understandable and commonsensical equation of one thing with another ended up in the fetishism of gold that was characteristic of the most highly advanced system of exchange, capitalism.⁴ I propose to attempt much the same sort of thing with the idea of the Noble Savage theme as it developed between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth century. I want to stress, however, that this is not a specifically Marxist exercise, but is generally dialectical; and that it owes as much to Vico, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Lévi-Strauss as it does to Marx. Marx was only the most persistent applicator of the logic of metaphor to the material structures of society. And whether or not we accept his characterization of the money theory of value as “absurd” (in fact, his characterization presupposes the absolute validity of the labor theory of value), we can still see in his explication of the fetishism of gold a particularly apt model for our own explication of the notion of the Wild Man as it developed in the Baroque age.

Application of this model requires only that we recognize the elements of paradox present in the use of the concept, the alienation implicit within the structure of this usage, and the hidden, or repressed, identification of the natives of the New World with natural objects (that is to say, their dehumanization) to be used (consumed, transformed, or destroyed) as their conquerors (or owners) desired. Nor should we be surprised by the idolization of the natives implied in the notion of the Noble Savage. This notion represents merely the late return of the humanity repressed in the original oxymoronic characterization of the native as a Wild Man. It is significant, I think, that this idolization of the natives of the New World occurs only after the conflict between the Europeans and the natives had already been decided and when, therefore, it could no longer hamper the exploitation of the latter by the former. As thus envisaged, the fetishization of the Wild Man, the ascription to him of super-human (that is, noble) powers, is only the ultimate stage in the elaboration of the paradox implicit in the notion of a “humanity” which is also “wild.”

This fetishization of the Wild Man was inevitable because, first of all, the concept of a specifically human nature is only negatively definable. Man is what the animal and the divine are not. Such at least is the sum and substance of the Aristotelian, Thomist, and Neoplatonic notions of man as occupant of the middle rungs of the ladder, or chain, of being. Christianity had reinforced this idea of the “middling” nature of man with the doctrine of the possibility of men becoming gods (or at least god-like), even though it restricted the realization of this possibility to the next world. At the same time, Christianity had provided the basis of belief in the possibility of a humanity “gone wild” by suggesting that men might degenerate into an animal state in this world through sin. Even though it held out the prospect of redemption to any such degenerate humanity, through the operation of divine grace upon a species-specific “soul,” supposedly present even in the most depraved of human beings, Christianity nonetheless did little to encourage the idea that a true humanity was realizable outside the confines either of the Church or of a “civilization” generally defined as Christian.

It was the vagueness of the definition of “humanity,” I suggest, that promoted the ambiguity in the original assessment of the “nature” of the inhabitants of the Americas. The first descriptions of American natives are characteristically anomalous. For example, John of Holywood's Sphera mundi (1498) describes the natives of America as “blue in colour and with square heads.”⁵ So too the caption of an engraving of 1505 describes the natives in what Hanke calls “fantastic” terms:

They go naked, both men and women. … They have no personal property, but all things are in common. They all live together without a king and without a government, and every one is his own master. They take for wives whom they first meet, and in all this they have no rule. … And they eat one another. … They live to be a hundred and fifty years old, and are seldom sick.⁶

Now, this description of native Americans might be seen as a distortion caused by the projection of a dream of Edenic innocence onto the fragmentary knowledge of the New World available at the time. But if this description of native Americans is on the manifest level a dream, on the latent or figurative level it has all the elements of a nightmare. For the description contains no less than five references to violations of taboos regarded as inviolable by Europeans of that age: nakedness, community of property, lawlessness, sexual promiscuity, and cannibalism. This may be, in the European commentators, a projection of repressed desires onto the lives of the natives (as the references to the health and longevity of the natives suggest), but if it is such, it is a desire tainted by horror and viewed with disgust. Within this original metaphorical characterization of the natives, we have the two moments necessary for the projection of the negative and positive poles of the dialectic of fetishism which will fall apart into contending ideals over the years to follow: Wild Man and Noble Savage respectively. This dialectic is describable, I maintain, in the terms of the logic of metaphor itself. This logic, in turn, elaborates the relationship between desire and the availability of the objects desired, which itself requires a calculus for the determination of its meaning.

Gold, land, incest, sexual promiscuity, cannibalism, longevity, health, violence, passivity, disease—all mixed in with a compulsive concern for the “souls” of the natives: these are the themes of those discussions of the Wild Man which interact with actual treatment of the natives to produce the fetish of the Noble Savage. We need not recapitulate the saga of the European's depredations of the natives of America (and elsewhere) in this essay. It is known well enough. We are concerned, rather, with the ideological dialectics which generated the idealized Noble Savage out of the myth of the Wild Man, which precedes it both in time and in the logic of the dialectic.

We have noted the anomalies contained in the early accounts of the natives and the paradoxes implicit in early descriptions of their lives: while violating all of the taboos that should have rendered them “unclean” and degenerate, the natives apparently enjoy the attributes formerly believed to have been possessed only by the Patriarchs of the Old Testament: robust health and longevity of life. The combination here is between moral depravity and a kind of physical super-humanity. What was required first of all, if theory was to follow practice and belief, was the explosion of the myth of a physical superhumanity. To this end one could argue one or another of two possibilities: savages were either a breed of super animals (similar to dogs, bears, or monkeys), which would account for their violation of human taboos and their presumed physical superiority to men; or they were a breed of degenerate men (descendants of the lost tribes of Israel or a race of men rendered destitute of reason and moral sense by the effects of a harsh climate).⁷ Whichever way the argument went, its effect was to draw a distinction, in the nature of an opposition, between a normal humanity (gentle, intelligent, decorous, and white) and an abnormal one (obstinate, gay, free, and red).⁸ This opposition is sufficient to transform the native from the merely “exotic” being depicted in the earliest characterizations into an “object”—an ontological “other” or “opposite” to “normal” men—and, consequently into a “thing” to be done with as need, conscience, or desire required. Las Casas perceived as much when, in criticizing Spanish imperial policy in 1519, he charged that the natives were being treated:

just as if … [they] were pieces of wood that could be cut off trees and transported for building purposes, or like flocks of sheep or any other kind of animals that could be moved around indiscriminately, and if some of them should die on the road little would be lost.⁹

The invocation of the authority of Aristotle by Las Casas' opponent, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, to justify the Indian's status as a “natural slave” was recognized from the beginning as an ideological justification for the terroristic practices deemed necessary for the pacification of the New World. Sepúlveda's views were denied official support by the Spanish crown after the debate of Valladolid of 1550-51; but the evidence adduced by Sepúlveda in defense of his ideas is instructive. First, and most important, was the “gravity of the sins which the Indians had committed, especially their idolatries and their sins against nature,”¹⁰ among which cannibalism and incest were foremost.¹¹ That certain tribes of the New World were organized along matrilineal, rather than patrilineal, lines only exacerbated the manifestly sexual anxieties of the Europeans, exhibited most immediately in their horror of (or fantasies about) the practices of incest and cannibalism. Such fantasies, we may surmise, are sublimations of an idyll of unrestricted consumption: oral and genital; and its alternative: the need to destroy that which cannot be consumed.

Consumption and destruction, in turn, are twin aspects of the idyll of unrestricted possession (whether of persons or of property) and presuppose the desirability of the thing to be possessed, that is to say, the assumption of the adequacy of the thing desired to the gratification of the person desiring it. And this assumption of the desirability of the thing desired is the basis of that dialectical relation between master and slave that permeates the psycho-social pathology of all oppressive systems. The return of the repressed suspicion that the natives being brutalized shared in fact a humanity with their brutalizers is the motivation behind the long debates over whether the natives possess, beneath their putatively animal aspects and behavior, a recognizable human soul.

First of all, it should be noted that the issue being debated is over essences or qualities, rather than attributes or behavior; and that these essences or qualities are considered to be spiritual in nature (hence capable of being present behind or within appearances); and that they are not, therefore, determinable by what might be called “empirical” evidence alone. The debate is therefore much more illuminative of the confusion present in Europeans' minds over the nature of their own humanity than it is either of the nature of the natives (which goes without saying, of course) or of the attitudes toward and the beliefs about natives held by Europeans.

The “natural slave” argument turns upon the issue of the native's talents, abilities, or presumed capacities to act autonomously in the world without disrupting or threatening the existence of “civilized” men. Here the implicit distinction is between “barbarians” and “city dwellers,” a distinction which simply juxtaposes two ways of life found universally, positions the individual in a situation of choice between these two ways of life, and accepts force as the ultimate form of mediation in cases where two ways of life come into conflict. Such a distinction is, one might say, a vertical one, since it differentiates between “insiders” and “outsiders” on a lateral plane of being (city and forest, sown and steppe lands, fixed and nomadic zones). But the distinction drawn between “human soul” and “animal soul” is a horizontal one, hierarchical inasmuch as it differentiates, not between two ways of life that might exist contiguously with one another, but two states of being which occupy superior and inferior positions on a vertical ladder or chain of being. The image of a vertically-ordered scale or hierarchy is inherently ambiguous, however, inasmuch as it presupposes a common stuff or essence shared by the various creatures dispersed across its ranks or some common source from which all of the creatures so dispersed derive, a common goal toward which they all tend, or a single cause of which they are all effects. The metaphysics of the chain-of-being idea renders unstable any attempt to draw, on its basis, a definitive distinction between natives and “normal” men. Every attempt to draw such a distinction is, in fact, if carried out rigorously, driven ultimately to the apprehension of the common qualities shared, not only by natives and Europeans, but also by animal and human nature in general.¹² This conceptual instability is the other side of the pantheism implicit in all such Neoplatonic doctrines. If all creatures derive from God and aspire to return to Him, then they must all “participate” in some way in the divine essence. This means that all creatures are governed and protected by the law adequate to the full realization of their species-specific attributes—and can be used by other creatures, even man, only for purposes consonant with the law governing both the whole and its parts. The ambiguity of the concept of a spiritual essence and the instability of any effort to draw definitive distinctions on the basis of a chain-of-being notion of reality may account for the continued popularity of the more purely physicalist “degeneracy” thesis, long after the Aristotelian theory of the “natural slave” and the Neoplatonic theory of “ontological inferiority” had run their courses.¹³

The degeneracy thesis received its most benign—and authoritative—statement in Buffon's work, which argued from the presupposition of the deleterious effects of the New World's environment on its inhabitants, both animal and human. The “monster” theory which this thesis generated received its most ardent defense in Cornelius de Pauw.¹⁴ Both the degeneracy and the monster theses appeal to a physical, and specifically quantitative, criterion for differentiating among the types of humanity which are to be classified. For Buffon, species are generated by cross-fertilization of genetic strains, which means that genetic combinations can be ranked according to capacities for survival in resultant breeds. Buffon has no doubt that all of the species of America, including the human, are congenitally inferior to their Old World counterparts. On the basis of size, strength, configuration, and so on, he assigns all of them to the category of “degenerates.” The transition from the notion of “degeneracy” to that of “monstrosity,” the idea that a given species' attributes are products of an “unnatural” mixture of strains, a mixture that is associated with the incestuous form, can follow as a matter of course. The degenerate is, however, only an inferior species-type; the monster, by contrast, is the product of a mixture of different species-types, the parts of which remain species-distinguishable and the whole of which is an anomaly. Buffon limits himself to the characterization of the natives of America as degenerate; De Pauw transforms degeneracy into monstrosity.

What should be stressed here, of course, is not the validity or invalidity of these various theories or the manner in which they might anticipate later scientific opinions, but the modes of the relationships which they posit between the normal and the abnormal. Both the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic conceptions of the relation between the animal and human worlds are conceived in the mode of continuity. The physicalist theories of Sepúlveda, Buffon, De Pauw, and even Linnaeus conceive this relationship in the mode of contiguity. Now, whereas things can be associated in both of these modalities of relationship, that of continuity is certainly more productive of tolerance and mediation by degree than that of contiguity. Of course, neither mode is conceivable without the other, so that in any given system of imagined relationships it is necessary to determine which mode is to be regarded as structural and which as functional. In general this determination will be dictated by the interests of the classifier: that is to say, whether he will wish to construct a system in which either differences or similarities are to be highlighted and whether his desire is to stress the conflictual or mediative possibilities of the situation he is describing. The two modes of relationship, continuous and contiguous, also engender different possibilities for praxis: missionary activity and conversion on the one side, war and extermination on the other.

The use of the term pacification to name genocidal policies and practices is important, because it signifies the advent of a fourth¹⁵ moment in the history of race relations in the period between the Renaissance and the late eighteenth century. This new moment is signalled by the currency of the idea of the Noble Savage. As Boas and others have shown, the Noble Savage idea was present in both classical and Christian thought, and was revived during the Renaissance, though never with the enthusiasm that characterized its use during the second half of the eighteenth century—and especially after Rousseau. How are we to account for the popularity of this idea in Europe, especially in the light of the fact that the time of its popularity postdates the resolution of the struggle against the natives and comes at a time when the issue between the Europeans and the natives has already been decided to the advantage of the former? This popularity might be put down to guilt feelings, to be sure; but I want to suggest another possibility. It is this: the idea of the Noble Savage is used, not to dignify the native, but rather to undermine the idea of nobility itself. As thus envisaged, the notion of the Noble Savage represents the ironic stage in the evolution of the Wild Man motif in European thought. It is an “absurd” idea, the fetishistic nature of which is obvious; for its true referent is not the savages of the new or any other world, but humanity in general, in relation to which the very notion of “nobility” is a contradiction.

That is to say, the concept of Noble Savage stands over against, and undercuts, the notion, not of the Wild Man, but rather of “noble man.” This is consistent with the logic of the conception of a Wild Man which, on the basis of the beliefs of the time, was on the face of it a contradictio in adiectis. The very notion of “man” is comprehensible only as it stands in opposition to “wild” and that term's various synonyms and cognates. There is no contradiction in “wild savage” since these are in fact the same words; so that “wild savage” is a pleonasm. But given the theory of the classes prevailing at the time, Noble Savage is an anomaly, since the idea of nobility (or aristocracy) stands opposed to the presumed wildness and savagery of other social orders as “civility” stands to “barbarism.”¹⁶ As thus envisaged, the Noble Savage idea represents not so much an elevation of the idea of the native as a demotion of the idea of nobility. That this is so can be seen by its usage on the one side and its effects on the other. It appears everywhere that nobility is under attack; it has no effect whatsoever on the treatment of the natives or on the way the natives are viewed by their oppressors. Moreover, the idea of the Noble Savage brings to the fore (or calls up) its opposite: that is to say, the notion of the “ignoble savage,” which has as much currency in literate circles in Europe as its opposite.¹⁷

Diderot and Rousseau both use the Noble Savage idea to attack the European social system of privilege, inherited power, and political oppression. The “ignoble savage” idea is used to justify the slave trade. To be sure, not all opponents of the Noble Savage idea were racists, as the examples of Goldsmith, Johnson, and Voltaire attest; but they were all political conservatives, which tells us something about the essentially domestic interests of their more radical opponents, the defenders of the idea of the Noble Savage, such as Diderot and Rousseau. The Noble Savage was a concept with which to belabor “nobility,” not to redeem the “savage.”

However, it is the suppressed function of the Noble Savage idea in the social debates of the eighteenth century that gives it its fetishistic character, both to those who espouse it as an ideal and those who reject it as a fiction. The anomaly of the concept is contained in the ambiguity of its referent. On the literal level, the concept asserts the “nobility” of the “savage.” This nobility is affirmed in the face of increasingly precise information about the natives of the New World (such as that provided not only by the colonists in America but also by explorers such as Cook), which suggests, if not their backwardness, then at least their essential differentness from European peoples. If the aim of those espousing the idea of the “nobility” of the “savages” had been to gain better treatment for native peoples, then they would have done better to stress those attributes which they shared with their European counterparts and to insist on the native's rights to “life, liberty, and property,” which were claimed for the European middle classes of the time. But the amelioration of the natives' treatment was not a primary consideration of those who promoted the idea of their nobility. The principal aim of the social radicals of the time was to undermine the very concept of “nobility”—or at least the idea of nobility tied to the notion of genetic inheritance. Yet, the idea of genetic inheritance is implicit in the concept of a “race” of “noble savages.” How are we to account for this contradiction?

Obviously, the idea of a race of savages who are noble had to be conceived as having the effect, given the documentation of the backwardness of native peoples, of demeaning the idea of nobility itself. The hidden or suppressed referent of the Noble Savage idea is, in short, that of “nobility” itself.¹⁸ This concept of “nobility” is implicitly characterized as “savage” on the figurative level of the phrase.

And was any concept more problematical, more subject to feelings of ambivalence, by aristocrat and bourgeois, conservative and radical, in the late eighteenth century, than that of “nobility”? However much the middle classes of Europe resented the aristocracy, they wished more to share their privileges than to destroy the distinction between the “better” and “worse” parts of the human race. However much they resented the inherited prerogatives of the nobles, they still in general honored the idea of a social hierarchy. Such a hierarchy might be conceived to be based on talent and wealth, rather than on birth, but it still presupposed a humanity divided into “haves” and “have-nots.” And it is such presuppositions that made the concept of the Noble Savage absurd and its use in social debate fetishistic.

It could only be thus, for at the basis of the idea of the Noble Savage was the assumption, shared by both sides of the social debates of the time, of the divisibility of mankind into qualitatively different parts. That such was in fact the case has been amply documented by Louis Chevalier in his ground-breaking Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Chevalier shows that efforts of European upper classes (aristrocratic and bourgeois) to classify, comprehend, and control the urban masses created by industrialization are beset by the same sense of anomaly and the same tendency towards fetishism as earlier efforts to make sense of the natives of the New World. On the one hand, there was a general tendency to deny to these new classes of urban poor the status of humanity; they are viewed as animals, wild, savage, and are turned into grotesque objects of fear and anxiety. On the other hand, there is a tendency on the part of those who would view them as the type of the humanity of the future to endow them with the attributes of deity, a tendency which reaches its apogee in Marx's designation of the proletariat as the very type of humanity come into its kingdom at the end of history.¹⁹ At the basis of the discussion of the nature of the new “dangerous classes” of mass society stands a deep and abiding anxiety over the very concept of humanity itself, a concept which, in turn, has its origin in an identification of true humanity with membership in a specific social class. That part of the urban masses which Hegel called the “rabble of paupers”²⁰ plays the same role in European thought of the nineteenth century that the natives of the New World played in its counterpart in the eighteenth century. Like the “wild men” of the New World, the “dangerous classes” of the Old World define the limitations of the general notion of “humanity” which informed and justified the Europeans' spoliation of any human group standing in the way of their expansion, and their need to destroy that which they could not consume.

Let me summarize: I have argued, first, that the very notion of a “wild humanity” constituted a contradiction in terms and that, in turn, this contradiction reflected an ambiguity about the nature of that “humanity” on which Europeans of the early modern age prided themselves. The proximity of whole peoples who differed in external aspect and way of life from those which characterized the European settlers in the New World was enough to bring this ambiguity to the fore of consciousness. The original anomaly of the first characterizations of the natives of the New World thus gave way to two opposed, and ultimately contradictory, ways of conceiving the relationship between the Europeans and the natives. On the one hand, the natives were conceived to be continuous with that humanity on which Europeans prided themselves; and it was this mode of relationship that underlay the policy of proselytization and conversion. On the other hand, the natives could be conceived as simply existing contiguously to the Europeans, as representing either an inferior breed of humanity or a superior breed, but in any case as being essentially different from the European breed; and it was this mode of relationship which underlay and justified the policies of war and extermination which the Europeans followed throughout the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century. But whether the natives were conceived to be continuous with or simply contiguous to the humanity to which the Europeans laid claim as a unique possession, the mere differentness of the natives' modes of life was enough to exacerbate the feelings of anxiety which the ambiguity of the concept of humanity engendered.

An ambiguity similar to that underlying settler-native relationships was also present in European discussions of social class relationships, with the concept of “nobility” playing the same role in these discussions that the concept of “humanity” did in discussions of settler-native relationships. What the bourgeoisie and its spokesmen were attacking, in their criticism of the nobility, was the nobility's claim to represent the highest type of humanity. But the attitude of the rising classes of eighteenth-century Europe with respect to the noble classes was a mixture of love and hate, envy and resentment. They wanted for themselves what the aristocracy claimed as its “natural” due. Within the context of a situation such as this, the spokesmen for the rising classes needed a concept to express their simultaneous rejection of the nobility's claims to privilege and desire for similar privileges for themselves. The concept of the Noble Savage served their ideological needs perfectly, for it at once undermined the nobility's claim to a special human status and extended that status to the whole of humanity. But this extension was done only in principle. In fact, the claim to nobility was meant to extend, neither to the natives of the New World nor to the lowest classes of Europe, but only to the bourgeoisie. That this was so is seen in the fact that, once the middle classes had established their right to a claim to the same humanity as that formerly claimed only by the nobility, they immediately turned to the task of dehumanizing those classes below them in the same way that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans in general had done to the natives of the New World.

Fetishism, I have said, is a mistaking of the form of a thing for its content or the taking of a part of a thing for the whole, and the elevation either of the form or the part to the status of a content or an essence of the whole. From the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, Europeans tended to fetishize the native peoples with whom they came into contact by viewing them simultaneously as monstrous forms of humanity and as quintessential objects of desire. Whence the alternative impulses to exterminate and to redeem the native peoples. But even more basic in the European consciousness of this time was the tendency to fetishize the European type of humanity as the sole possible form that humanity in general could take. This race fetishism was soon transformed, however, into another, and more virulent form: the fetishism of class, which has provided the bases of most of the social conflicts of Europe since the French Revolution.

Notes

1. See the essays of Gary B. Nash, Earl Miner, Maximillian E. Novak, John G. Burke, Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., and Hayden White in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh 1972).

2. Three non-technical senses, I should add. I am treating fetishism here as a fixation on the form of a thing as against its content or on the part of a thing as against the whole. One of the points I try to make is that such reductionism is inevitable in the use of certain concepts, such as “humanity” or “civilization,” since these concepts are inherently unstable, having no non-contestable referent. When a given part of humanity compulsively defines itself as the pure type of mankind in general and defines all other parts of the human species as inferior, flawed, degenerate, or “savage,” I call this an instance of fetishism. In such a situation the tendency is to endow those parts of humanity which are, in effect, being denied any claim to the title of human with magical, even supernatural, powers, as happened in the myths of the Wild Man of the Middle Ages. If these magical or supernatural powers are fixed upon as desiderata for all men, including Europeans, then there will be a tendency to fetishize the imagined possessors of such powers, for example, the Noble Savage.

3. Philosophers spend a good deal of time exposing the metaphorical expressions taken literally and hypostatized as bases of metaphysical systems. See for example Colin M. Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor (New Haven and London 1962; rev. ed. Columbia, S.C. 1970), which is concerned, among other things, to expose the metaphor which lies at the heart of mechanistic metaphysics as both crucial “mistake” and generator of a set of “myths.”

4. See the famous opening chapter, entitled “Commodities,” of Capital, trans. from the 4th German ed. by Eden and Cedar Paul (New York 1929). Marx writes: “Thus the mystery of the commodity form is simply this, that it mirrors for men the social character of their own labour, mirrors it as an objective character attaching to the labour products themselves, mirrors it as a social natural property of these things. Consequently the social relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour, presents itself to them as a social relation, not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. Thanks to this transference of qualities, the labour products become commodities, transcendental or social things which are at the same time perceptible by our senses. … We are concerned only with a definite social relation between human beings, which, in their eyes, has here assumed the semblance of a relation between things. To find an analogy, we must enter the enbulous world of religion. In that world, the products of the human mind become independent shapes, endowed with lives of their own, and able to enter into relations with men and women. The products of the human hand do the same thing in the world of commodities. I speak of this as the fetishistic character which attaches to the products of labour …” (Ibid., 45-46).

5. Quoted in Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Chicago 1959; rpt. Bloomington, Ind. 1970) 4.

6. Ibid., 4-5.

7. See Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archeology of an Idea,” in Dudley and Novak (n. 1 above) 3-38; Gary B. Nash, “The Image of the Indian in the Southern Colonial Mind,” in the same work, 56-57, 71, 77; and Hanke (n. 5 above) 27. The definitive study of European attitudes towards the New World and its inhabitants must be Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900, rev. and enlarged ed., trans. by Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh 1973).

8. See John G. Burke, “The Wild Man's Pedigree: Scientific Method and Racial Anthropology,” in Dudley and Novak (n. 1 above) 266-267. According to Linnaeus, the Asiatic is “austere, arrogant, greedy” and of course “yellow,” while the African is “crafty, slothful, careless” and of course “black.” The four races thus differentiated are, however, accorded the title of “men” in Linnaeus' system and distinguished from “wild” men on the one side and “monsters” on the other.

9. Quoted in Hanke (n. 5 above) 17.

10. Ibid., 41.

11. Ibid., 46-47.

12. The apprehension of a common essence is not a threat to laterally dispersive systems of thought inasmuch as it is presupposed as the basis of the differentiation given in the mode of contiguous relationships. In vertical systems, however, the apprehension of similarities is a problem, since what is given in any hierarchical arrangement is differentness.

13. See Gerbi (n. 7 above) Ch. v.

14. Ibid., 56-67.

15. The other three “moments” I take to be the moment of the originally “anomalous” characterizations of the natives, the moment of their elevation by Las Casas and others as childlike and hypersensitive species of men, and the moment of their degradation as “degenerates” and “monsters.” The advent of the Noble Savage concept and its elevation into an ideal for the whole of humanity during the second half of the eighteenth century is the fourth moment in the debate, “ironic,” I would maintain, since it refers not to the natives, but to the presumed “nobility” of human beings, especially in Europe, to whom the title of a full humanity had been denied by the defenders of the aristocracy as exemplars of a “full” humanity.

16. See Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (2 vols. Princeton 1959-64), Vol. 1, Ch. i-iii, which discuss the problematical nature of the terms “nobility” and “aristocracy” on the eve of the French Revolution.

17. Gerbi (n. 7 above) 66 ff.

18. It should be noted that the French “le bon sauvage” has the same ideological implications as the English “noble savage” analyzed in this paper. In both cases, the effect of the usage is to draw a distinction between presumed types of humanity on manifestly qualitative grounds, rather than such superficial bases as skin color, physiognomy, or social status. The appeal to such qualitative criteria as “goodness” and “nobility” must be construed ironically, of course, and is comprehensible only within the context of a social system in which a class that has claimed aristocratic privilege has ceased to display the qualities of leadership and rule which had originally justified its claim to noble status.

19. Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York 1973) 362-372).

20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford 1965) § 244, p. 150.