That tradition may be making a return to Britain and other parts of the West, thanks to diversity.
Posted on 08/15/2011 9:31:45 PM PDT by AustralianConservative
While popular in revolutionary leftwing Europe, the romantic myth of the “Noble Savage” couldn’t be sustained in real-life Australia. In the 1890s, a Queensland missionary wrote:
‘The Noble Savage’ may exist as a romantic ideal within the covers of a book, but that secluded within the covers of the tropical scrub, and roaming wild his native forests, unfettered by the form and fashion of civilszation, he is a being very different in reality from the fallacious painting of his picture by a poet’s imagination. [i]
Decades earlier, Captain Watkin Tench expressed his unfashionable displeasure of le bon sauvage:
A thousand times…have I wished that those European philosophers, whose closet speculations exalt a state of nature above a state of civilisation, could survey the phantom which their heated imaginations have raised; a savage romancing for prey amidst his native deserts is a creature deformed by all those passions which afflict and degrade our nature, unsoftened by the influence of religion, philosophy and legal instruction. [ii]
In fact, men from many nationalities, rejected the myth of the Noble Savage, when confronted with the realities of tribal life. For in their socially-incorrect minds, there was nothing glamorous about malnourished aboriginal women, for example. Or put frankly, the eye was more reliable than made-for-secular-Europe narratives:
Dinesh D’Souza reminds us in The End of Racism of a more realistic picture painted by Robert Hughes:
The Iora people never washed themselves, but “spent their lives coated in a mixture of rancid fish oil, animal grease, sand, dust, and sweat.”
Barbarically:
“One common form of courtship was for a man to “fix on some female of a tribe at enmity with his own…stupefy her with blows on her head, back, neck…then drag her streaming with blood…till he reaches his tribe.”
(Excerpt) Read more at weekendlibertarian.blogspot.com ...
THe Iora people sound and smell like Democrats (a take off on the old Bob Hope comment about zombies).
Well not to defend pre-iron age culture of the people in question but Europeans were using bloodletting in medicine well in to the 18th century.
ping for later.
This used to be accepted as a parodical template for modern courtship in the form of the caveman with his club dragging home his catch. One considered that this was no longer acceptable, but it was obviously not beyond contemplation.
I remember an article that referenced the memoir of one early nineteenth-century escaped convict who spent twelve years with the aborigines. Contrary to the idealized, disneyfied current image the bands were continually warring with one another, such that very few men made it to middle age.
I just wish I could remember the name.
Thomas Hobbes
That tradition may be making a return to Britain and other parts of the West, thanks to diversity.
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...is no myth.
Welcome to the nightmare.
in Africa, they do cuts over the painful area and rub in medicine as a cure.
In Asia, they burn herbs over the affected area. Both are forms of “counterirritant” therapy that relieve pain, similar to putting on a hot compress or linament.
Neither confirm or deny the “noble savage” myth. I doubt Tasmanian culture was as bad as this outsider says it was. People who work in other societies tend to either see the folks as “primitive nobelmen” or “primitive savages”. In reality, they are just folks, and what they do can be understood if you bother to ask them why they do such things.
But the noble savage idea was nonsens: It was wrong because those intellectuals wanted to destroy western culture and religion, so they insisted that man without a society or laws as “noble” and free, and made up the “noble savage” idea to prove this was true.
This made Professor Mary Anne Glendon wonder: they talk about the free man (i.e. the noble savage who was free of social and legal constraints) but they never discussed what the “free women and children” were doing all this time.
The answer is, of course, that in “primitive” societies, people are not free: they live in extended families who have to care for each other, so few people are “free”.
the “Noble” savage myth had little or nothing to do with how primitive societies actually worked.
Excellent comments.
Yeah? Well, “feminist anthropology” is three times as bad.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Haha.
I guess it was the extent of the practice, and the ways in which it was carried out.
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