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.