SOURCE: Ellingson, Ter. Introduction to The Myth of the Noble Savage, pp. 1-8. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Ellingson questions the attribution of the idea of the Noble Savage to Rousseau, arguing that the concept is an ongoing tradition and should not be attributed to any one individual.]

THE MYTH OF THE “MYTH OF THE NOBLE SAVAGE”

More than two centuries after his death, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is still widely cited as the inventor of the “Noble Savage”—a mythic personification of natural goodness by a romantic glorification of savage life—projected in the very essay (Rousseau 1755a) in which he became the first to call for the development of an anthropological Science of Man. Criticism of the Noble Savage myth is an enduring tradition in anthropology, beginning with its emergence as a formalized discipline. George Stocking (1987: 153) has cited a reference as early as 1865 by John Lubbock, vice president of the Ethnological Society of London, the first anthropological organization in the English-speaking world; and other early citations include such leading figures as E. B. Tylor (1881: 408) and Franz Boas (1889: 68). The critique extends throughout the twentieth century, appearing in the work of scholars such as Marvin Harris.

Although considerable difference existed as to the specific characterization of this primitive condition, ranging from Hobbes's “war of all against all” to Rousseau's “noble savage,” the explanation of how some men had terminated the state of nature and arrived at their present customs and institutions was approached in a fairly uniform fashion.

(Harris 1968: 38-39)

And it continues into the present. For example, a recent article begins with the assertion, “The noble savage, according to eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is an individual living in a ‘pure state of nature’—gentle, wise, uncorrupted by the vices of civilization” (Aleiss 1991: 91). Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991: 26), taking a more complex historical position, nevertheless states, “Rousseau … thus formalized the myth of the ‘noble savage.’”

Clearly, in the 1990s the Noble Savage and Rousseau's purported role in its creation remains a leading critical concern both in anthropology and in the growing list of disciplines that take an interest in the ethnographic literature and the history of cross-cultural encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans. Where the Noble Savage is invoked, Rousseau's name is almost invariably found in close proximity, although sometimes with their linkage implied in ambiguous ways. Edna C. Sorber, for example, writes,

They probably didn't plan it that way, but the perpetrators of the “noble savage” concept in 18th and 19th century America were doing the rhetorical criticism that more specialized rhetorical critics were ignoring. While the followers of the Rousseau point of view may have originally been the philosophers, as writings on the American Indian came to dominate such discussions other considerations took precedence.

(1972: 227)

In a very few cases, Rousseau is identified not as the original author of the Noble Savage but rather as the most effective agent of its promotion. Bobbi S. Low (1996: 354), for example, writes, “Dryden (in The Conquest of Granada, 1672) seems to have been the first to use the term. Rousseau, of course, used the concept effectively to anathematize civilization” (cf. McGregor's discussion of Rousseau's role, below). But in most cases, attributions of authorship to Rousseau are straightforward and apparently unproblematic. Katherine A. Dettwyler (1991: 375) refers to “images of Rousseau's ‘noble savage’ transported to the past”; and Michael S. Alvard (1993: 355-56) charges that “Jean Jacques [sic] Rousseau's concept of the ‘Noble Savage’ has been extended and re-defined into the ‘Ecological Noble Savage’ by both conservationists and anthropologists.” Even such a generally careful scholar as Stocking (1987: 17) remarks, “The ambiguous ‘noble savage’ of Rousseau's ‘Discourse on Inequality’ was not the only manifestation of primitivism or historical pessimism among the French philosophers of progress.”

None of these authors apparently feels any need to support the claim of Rousseau's authorship with a citation; it is simply, unquestionably true, presumably one of those public-domain bits of information for which the citation is an implicit “Everyone knows …” After all, even the Oxford English Dictionary says:

Noble (4 a) Having high moral qualities or ideals; of a great or lofty character. (Also used ironically.) Noble Savage, primitive man, conceived of in the manner of Rousseau as morally superior to civilized man.

But like some other anthropological folklore, this particular invented tradition is not only wrong but long since known to be wrong; and its continuing vitality in the face of its demonstrated falsity confronts us with a particularly problematic current in the history of anthropology. A convenient point of entry to this current is Fairchild's classic study, The Noble Savage. Fairchild, an avowed enemy of the Noble Savage myth and an outspoken critic of Rousseau's influence on romantic thought, investigated Rousseau's writings (Fairchild 1928: 120-39) and was forced to conclude, as an earlier examiner of Rousseau's “supposed romanticism” (Lovejoy 1923) had implied, that the linkage of Rousseau to the Noble Savage concept was unfounded: “The fact is that the real Rousseau was much less sentimentally enthusiastic about savages than many of his contemporaries, did not in any sense invent the Noble Savage idea, and cannot be held wholly responsible for the forms assumed by that idea in English Romanticism” (Fairchild 1928: 139).

Those few scholars who, since Fairchild, have bothered to look critically at the question have come to the same conclusion. Thus, although anthropologists have generally tended to accept the legend of Rousseau's connection with the Noble Savage more or less on faith, Stanley Diamond (1974: 100-1) points out his critical perspective and his avoidance of the term. Scholars of literary criticism and cultural studies who have examined the issue in any depth have reached similar or stronger conclusions. For example, Gaile McGregor, retracing Fairchild's investigation from a late-twentieth-century perspective, says,

Despite his undoubted influence, however, it is important to distinguish Rousseau's own position on primitivism from popular assessments. As in Montaigne's case, the text itself contains elements which are obviously inhospitable to an unadulterated theory of noble savagery. While he does indeed, in Moore's words, lavish “uncommon praise on some aspects of savage life,” Rousseau's overall estimate of that level of existence is far from enthusiastic. … Like Montaigne, then, Rousseau's aim was basically relativistic.

(1988: 19-20)

And Tzvetan Todorov (1993: 277) similarly concludes, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thought is traditionally associated with primitivism and the cult of the noble savage. In reality (and attentive commentators have been pointing this out since the beginning of the twentieth century), Rousseau was actually a vigilant critic of these tendencies.”

So it seems clear that we must conclude that Rousseau's invention of the Noble Savage myth is itself a myth. But this conclusion, unanimously supported by serious investigators and clear as it is, raises some obvious questions. If Rousseau did not create the concept of the Noble Savage, who did? How did it become associated in popular and professional belief with Rousseau, and with the origins of anthropology? And, perhaps less obviously, why has belief in a discredited theory lingered on for seven decades after the publication of a clear disproof, particularly among anthropologists themselves? Is there something in the nature of anthropology itself, either in its intrinsic nature or in its historically contingent construction, that requires such a belief?

I will suggest in the following pages that there is; that not only is everything we have believed about the myth of the Noble Savage wrong, but it is so because our profession has been historically constructed in such a way as to require exactly this kind of obviously false belief. In outlining this suggestion, I will advance some apparently contradictory proposals: that belief in the Noble Savage never existed but that the Noble Savage was indeed associated with both the conceptual and the institutional foundations of anthropology, and not only once but twice, in widely separated historical periods, both before and after Rousseau's time; and finally, that there was indeed a single person who was the original source of both the Noble Savage concept and of the call for the foundation of a science of human diversity but that this person was not Rousseau.

A ROSE AS REPRESENTED BY ANOTHER NAME MIGHT STINK

If Rousseau was not the inventor of the Noble Savage, who was? One who turns for help to Fairchild's 1928 study, a compendium of citations from romantic writings on the “savage,” may be surprised to find 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 to the nineteenth century, showing a rich variety of ways in which writers romanticized and idealized those whom Europeans of the period 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, and often several times per page, it turns out that in every instance, with four possible exceptions, they are Fairchild's words and not those of the authors cited. The myth of the Noble Savage suddenly seems very nebulous, and problematic in quite a different way than we might have expected.

But before concluding that the Noble Savage was a figment of the imagination or some kind of conceptual hoax, we should examine the apparent exceptions. Three of these date from after Rousseau's death. In Henry Mackenzie's novel Man of the World (1787), when a European captive who has lived several years with American Indians decides to return to civilization, his “imagination drew, on this side, fraud, hypocrisy and sordid baseness, while on that seemed to preside honesty, truth and savage nobleness of soul” (cited in Fairchild 1928: 92). While not an exact match, the wording is acceptably close, and the comparison of “savage nobleness” with civilized corruption seems to fit the myth as most have understood it. The comparison is, however, specifically identified as a construction of the imagination rather than as reality, and the context is not that of an idealization of the savage. For, as Fairchild (1928: 90-92) points out, Mackenzie places a noticeable emphasis on savage violence and cruelty, which seems incompatible with the Noble Savage myth. Furthermore, the passage leaves some doubt as to whether the construction “savage nobleness” implies equivalence or qualification: that is, might “savage” nobleness contrast with some other variety, such as “true nobleness”?

The other two cases are even more doubtful. In one, the wife of the poet Shelley describes the plot of one of his unfinished works written in 1822: “An Enchantress, living in one of the islands of the Indian Archipelago, saves the life of a Pirate, a man of savage but noble nature” (Fairchild 1928: 309). Here, despite the verbal similarity, the point is one of reference to qualities of an individual's nature rather than to man in a state of nature; and the “but” suggests an exceptional case that violates the normal opposition between “savage” and “noble” natures. The difference in implication of the application of the term “savage” to the pirate and to peoples living in a “state of nature” should be obvious enough to need no comment.

In the third case, Sir Walter Scott says in 1818 in The Heart of Midlothian: “One … stood upright before them, a lathy young savage. … Yet the eyes of the lad were keen and sparkling; his gesture free and noble, like that of all savages” (cited in Fairchild 1928: 317). Here again, despite the verbal resemblance, the nobility is of a different kind, a nobility of gesture; and the “savage” in question is actually a Scottish Highlander! Although Fairchild rightly points out, here and elsewhere, that attributions of savage wildness and natural goodness were often transposed from more exotic locales onto various groups of Europeans,¹ he also points out that Scott showed a rather obvious disinterest in the purported nobility of more ethnographically remote peoples.

Given the problematic nature of these three cases, we seem drawn more strongly toward an impression that there is little support in the literature for the idea that there was widespread belief, or even any belief at all, in the existence of something actually called “the Noble Savage.” But is this really important? Why, after all, should we problematize the words “Noble Savage” rather than their conceptual content or objective field of reference? Isn't this mere empty formalism? After all, isn't there overwhelming evidence that “savages” were heavily laden by European writers with the baggage of romantic naturalism, which is the point of the critique, rather than the label attached to it?

But the fact is that both the label and the contents are problematic. In Fairchild's survey of “exotic” and “romantic naturalist” literature, for example, one finds the label “Noble Savage” affixed to literary representations ranging from the most absurd parroting of Parisian salon discourse by Huron warriors to African slaves lamenting their lost freedom. Are these really equivalent cases of “romantic naturalism,” equally deserving of the critical scorn and derision implied by labeling them both “Noble Savage”?

In some of the cases Fairchild cites, “primitive” and “natural” ways of life seem so idealized and exalted that few readers could avoid wondering whether such paradises could ever exist on earth, or, if they did once, that anyone could ever exchange them for “civilization.” And in some cases, “civilization” takes on such a quasi-hellish character that one wonders how it could ever have developed at all, or prevented its victims from mass desertion to happier states of existence. But in other cases, even the slightest criticism of European cruelty or corruption, or the least hint that non-European peoples might have any good qualities whatsoever, seems to qualify as “romantic naturalism,” to be labeled as yet a further instance of belief in the “Noble Savage.”

One can, of course, argue for the real merits of connecting such cases and maintain that any belief at all in things such as freedom or goodness is in reality nothing but romantic fantasy. But all such arguments, like the arguments against them, are necessarily problematic and require deliberate and careful construction. How much easier, instead, to have a ready-made polemic label such as “the Noble Savage” that assumes the validity of the connection even as it heaps scorn on any imaginable opposition, and saves the work of constructing an argument by assuming what it purports to critique? It seems that, given the problematic nature of its field of reference, we have no other choice but to also seriously consider the problematic nature of “the Noble Savage” as a discursive construct. Neither its content nor its verbal form should be accepted at face value, without further question.

But as soon as we begin to consider the Noble Savage concept as a discursive construct rather than as a substantive given element of objective or commonsense reality, we begin to further problematize it. The term is rather obviously a forced union of questionable assumptions. That men could ever be either savage, that is, wild, or noble, that is, exalted above all others either by an environmentally imposed morality or by their station of birth, is equally questionable; that the two could be causally related is absurd. The absurdity precludes serious belief in the concept, exactly the point of their juxtaposition. The Noble Savage clearly belongs to the rhetoric of polemic criticism rather than of ethnographic analysis, or even of serious credal affirmation.

As a discursive artifact, the term is further problematic in that it would appear to belong almost exclusively to Anglophone culture, to the English language and its writers in Britain and North America. The expression is simply not widely used in other languages: compare, for example, Todorov's (1993: 270) section called “The Noble Savage” in English translation, with “le Bon Sauvage,” literally “the good savage,” in the French original (Todorov 1989). A more striking comparison arises in juxtaposing the French, Spanish, German, and English abstracts of Georges Guille-Escuret's “Cannibales isolés et monarques sans histoire” (1992: 327, 345): the English “noble savage” contrasts noticeably with bon sauvage, buen salvaje, and gute Wilde, all sharing attributions of goodness and wildness but lacking the highly charged polarities of the English term. And one wonders why the editors found it necessary to mark only the English term by framing it in quotes. Could it be that communication with English readers on this subject requires a dramatically highlighted emotional intensity? If so, where did that intensity, or the need for it, come from?

One might protest that le bon sauvage and “the Noble Savage” simply mean the same thing, that they are dictionary equivalents, and that translation would never be possible if strict logical equivalence and formal congruity were always demanded (see Church 1950; Carnap 1955). In fact, the assertion of identity may be true of their extensive meaning, in the sense of reference to the “same” object; but intensively, they say something very different about it and so represent their objects very differently. The French bon sauvage and its cognates express a gentle irony; the English “Noble Savage” drips with sarcasm, intensified by its obligatory framing in capitals and/or quotes. One usage embodies a critical stance that could, and sometimes does (see Atkinson 1924; Todorov 1989), include a dimension of critical appreciation; the other, a stance that is uncompromisingly hostile and polemic.

More specifically, nobility transcends mere goodness; it represents a more exalted state, and significantly, the exaltation implies an innate exaltation above other beings and their qualities. Nobility is a construction not only of a moral quality but also of a social class and social hierarchy. But is this not a contradictory association, given the supposed linkage of the term with eighteenth-century “romantic” advocates of egalitarian, democratic ideals? Perhaps the term represents a simple attempt to liberate by defeudalizing language, distinguishing “true” moral nobility from a class designation. Or perhaps the term's apparent link to orders of hierarchy and dominance is more than superficial. A look at its historical usage suggests this is in fact the case.

The single clear citation of the term “Noble Savage” in either Fairchild (1928) or McGregor (1988), which is also cited as the term's earliest occurrence by the Oxford English Dictionary, comes not from the romantic period or the eighteenth century but from John Dryden's seventeenth-century drama, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards:

                    I am as free as Nature first made man,
‘Ere the base Laws of Servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble Savage ran.

(Dryden 1672: 34)

Here, the freedom of the noble savage is not only associated with wildness and nature, and contrasted with a baseness that must be implicitly attributed to civilization, but the latter is associated with servitude linked to law. The combination is specific and complex enough to suggest an underlying argument or a conceptual foundation not clarified in the lines themselves. Dryden's words appear to be a poetic condensation of a preexisting construction that we must seek in earlier sources; a likely starting point would be the ethnographic sources on “savage” ways of life.

Note

1. Indeed, Audrey Smedley (1993: 52ff.) argues, with good reason, that English conceptions of “the savage” were grounded in early expansionist conflicts with Irish pastoralists and, more broadly, in isolation from, and denigration of, neighboring European peoples. The ethnographic literature lends considerable support to such arguments. Yet emerging European views of “savagery” were the product of an international literature of exploration, widely circulated in translations, in which the experience of any single nation could play only a partial role in shaping the overall emergence of the concept. The common focus of all discussions, determined by shared new experience of a steadily growing number of nations, was the centrality of the American Indians in defining the nature of “savagery.” In this process, the French played a greater role than other nations; Spanish discourse seems to have focused more on “barbarians” than on “savages” (Pagden 1982), and the English entered into the American colonial scene at a later date, after the terms of the discourse had already become established.

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