Noble savage

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The noble savage is an ideal image of the "natural man" unspoiled by civilization . The concept expresses the idea that man without ties of civilization is inherently good. To this day it is a popular topos of culturally critical authors. In modern ethnology , the concept of the noble savage is considered an outdated thesis.

After the European discovery and conquest of America , this idea found some resonance; he took shape in particular in the epic La Araucana (around 1570) by Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga . A hundred years later, John Dryden took up the idea again, in the 18th century the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of its prominent exponents and this idea found many followers, especially in the Romantic era .

References can be found in the state of innocence in the biblical Garden of Eden before the Fall , in the Greek myth of the golden age and the island of the blessed in Greek mythology . Unlike the idea of ​​the “noble savage”, these mythological traditions locate the pre-civilizational “golden age” in a past world age and not in the so-called “ primitive peoples ” that exist today . While in traditional mythological worldviews the sequence of the world ages is usually seen as a decline and a deterioration, the developers of the modern enlightenment-evolutionist worldview discarded this traditional view of things and reversed it by using history as a permanent cultural development from a not paradisiacal, but "Raw" original state described.

Oroonoko stabs Imoinda - Illustration for a staging of Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko or The Royal Slave by Thomas Southerne in 1776

development

The idea of ​​the “noble savage” presupposes the clash between a “ civilization ” and a “natural society”. Such a situation existed during the expansion of European powers ( Spain , Portugal , France , England , the Netherlands ) from the end of the 15th century. The emerging colonization in Africa, Asia, America and the Pacific led to the appropriation of the cultures there in the sphere of influence of the conquerors.

Despite the recognition of the colonized peoples as human beings, there was no effort to grant them equal political or economic rights. These people were classified as “primitive” or “wild”, which indirectly justified unequal treatment (two-class society), oppression ( slavery ) or cultural or physical extermination.

The idea of ​​the noble savage can in part be seen as an attempt to upgrade the unequally treated. It is noble precisely because of the "originality", which is expressed in the low influence on its environment or in its natural way of life. This is seen as a kind of human “original state”; comparable to an “innocent” child who does not yet have to take on extensive responsibility for what they do. The actual interest of the discourse, however, is not the “savage”, but one's own society, which is compared to the noble savage as a yardstick. It is seen as corrupt and depraved. Similarly, in his Germania, Tacitus did not want to describe the Germans of that time ethnographically correct, but wanted to hold up a mirror to his own Roman society.

In the literature

Even Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce called Baron de Lahontan, an explorer in New France , linked in 1705 with the figure of the "noble savage", his interlocutor from the people of Huron , a radically socially critical and political view of the situation in the old Europe.

The natural state of man postulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his work Discours sur l'inégalité in 1755 is generally regarded as the origin of this idealized image of man.

In 1771, Louis Antoine de Bougainville published a detailed travel report of his circumnavigation, Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile . In this report, the stay in Tahiti was his most interesting stop, here the European civilization meets the culture of the Tahitians, the noble or good savages. Friedrich Melchior Grimm , then in charge of the Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique , asked Denis Diderot to write a book review of Bougainville's travelogue. Diderot complied with this request, but developed the review further into an essay, Supplément au voyage de Bougainville 1771 .

The leather stocking novels by James Fenimore Cooper are one of the first known works to literarily process the concept of the noble savage. It is embodied in them by the two Mohicans Chingachgook and his son Uncas. The latter in particular is considered a classic example of the noble savage in literature.

The Wild West Karl Mays provides for the struggle between good and bad widely used as the argument of the noble savage (v. A. Embodied in the figure of the Apache-chief Winnetou) with the corrupted by civilization Wilden (about the opponent Tangua). In his travel story "Am Rio de la Plata" (vol. 12 of the collected works of Bamberg's Karl-May-Verlag), the author uses a quasi-scientific argumentation to spread the pair of opposites of the noble (North American) and the spoiled by ethnic "mixing", ignoble South American Indians.

Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley is a more modern adaptation of the subject.

Properties of the noble savage

The idea of ​​the noble savage presupposes a superficial knowledge of the life of other peoples. Many authors and readers are not very interested in philosophical questions of human development, in pedagogy or social criticism. Instead, she is driven by the need for entertainment, curiosity and a shudder at the strange. One can already call this attitude exoticism . Anyone who suspects the noble in foreign cultures, as originally presented, is looking for a “ paradise on earth ”.

Modern research has not been able to confirm the idea of ​​the noble savage: nonexistent or highly idealized properties are ascribed to him, as are often real phenomena of individual ethnic groups (such as: non-domineering and egalitarian social structures , "war and peace" in pre-state societies , certain "nature-friendly" Taboos and totemic ideas , sanctification of the earth , “original affluent society” ) transferred unchecked and stereotyped to all supposedly “noble savages”. These are for example:

The idea of ​​the "noble savage" also influences the political debate. One example is the way industrial society deals with the habitat of indigenous peoples (such as the rainforest ethnic groups in South America or the Aborigines in Australia ). Steven Pinker criticized the idea in The Blank Sheet (2002).

literature

  • Robert B. Edgerton: Deceptive Paradises. The myth of the happy indigenous people. Kabel, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-8225-0287-1 .
  • Ter Ellingson: The Myth of the Noble Savage . University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 2001, ISBN 0-520-22268-7 .
  • Johannes Fabian: Time and the Other. How anthropology makes its object. Columbia University Press, New York NY 1983, ISBN 0-231-05590-0 .
  • Karl-Heinz Kohl : Disenchanted look. The image of the good savage and the experience of civilization. Medusa, Berlin 1981, ISBN 3-88602-028-2 (Simultaneously: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 1980: On the relationship between cultural foreign experience and civilizing self-awareness in ethnography and anthropology of the 18th century. ), (Also: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-518-37772-8 (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch 1272)).
  • Peter Martin: Black devils, noble Moors. Africans in the history and consciousness of the Germans . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-930908-64-6 .
  • Sirinya Pakditawan: The stereotyping Indian representation and its modification in the work of James Fenimore Cooper. Hamburg 2008 (Hamburg, Univ., Diss., 2008).
  • Gerd Stein (Ed.): The noble savages. The transfiguration of Indians, Negroes and South Sea Islanders against the background of colonial atrocities. From the 16th to the 20th century (= ethnoliterary reading books 1). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-596-23071-3 .
  • Marianna Torgovnick: Gone Primitive. Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL et al. 1990, ISBN 0-226-80831-9 .
  • Eric Robert Wolf: Europe and the People without History. University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al., 1982, ISBN 0-520-04898-9 .

Web links

Wikisource: Der Wilde  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lutz Huth; Michael Krzeminski: Representation in politics, media and society. Königshausen & Neumann, 2007 ISBN 3-8260-3626-3 , p. 230 ff.
  2. ^ Jürgen von Stackelberg: Diderot. Artemis-Verlag, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-7608-1303-8 , p. 107; Theo Jung: "Voices of nature. Diderot, Tahiti and the homme naturel ", in: Isabelle Deflers (ed.): Denis Diderot and die Macht , Berlin 2016, pp. 135–155. on-line
  3. ↑ Michael Leroy Oberg: Uncas: First of the Mohegans . Cornel University Press, new edition 2006, ISBN 9780801472947 , p. 2 ( excerpt (Google) )
  4. ^ Gaile McGregor: The Noble Savage in the New World Garden: Notes Toward a Syntactics of Place . Popular Press, 1988, ISBN 9780879724177 , pp. 120–176, especially pp. 136–138 ( excerpt (Google) )
  5. ^ Gaile McGregor: The Noble Savage in the New World Garden: Notes Toward a Syntactics of Place . Popular Press, 1988, ISBN 9780879724177 , p. 233 ( excerpt (Google) )