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"This is an immensely rich, sometimes dazzling contribution to the history of anthropology. Ellingson strikes a good balance between archival and presentist approaches, and his account has the plot of a turning-and-twisting mystery story."—Johannes Fabian, author of Out of Our Minds
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
I. The Birth of the Noble Savage
1. Colonialism, Savages, and Terrorism
2. Lescarbot’s Noble Savage and Anthropological Science
3. Poetic Nobility: Dryden, Heroism, and Savages
II. Ambiguous Nobility: Ethnographic Discourse on “Savages” From Lescarbot to Rousseau
4. The Noble Savage Myth and Travel-Ethnographic Literature
5. Savages and the Philosophical Travelers
6. Rousseau’s Critique of Anthropological Representations
III. Discursive Oppositions:The “Savage” After Rousseau
7. The Ethnographic Savage from Rousseau to Morgan
8. Scientists, the Ultimate Savage, and the Beast Within
9. Philosophers and Savages
10. Participant Observation and the Picturesque Savage
11. Popular Views of the Savage
12. The Politics of Savagery
IV. The Return of the Noble Savage
13. Race, Mythmaking, and the Crisis in Ethnology
14. Hunt’s Racist Anthropology
15. The Hunt-Crawfurd Alliance
16. The Coup of 1858–1860
17. The Myth of the Noble Savage
18. Crawfurd and the Breakup of the Racist Alliance
19. Crawfurd, Darwin, and the “Missing Link”
Epilogue: The Miscegenation Hoax
V. The Noble Savage Meets the Twenty-First Century
20. The Noble Savage and the World Wide Web
21. The Ecologically Noble Savage
22. The Makah Whale Hunt of 1999
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Ter Ellingson is an anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington.
Summary
A study where the myth of the Noble Savage is an altogether different myth from the one defended or debunked by many over the years. It refutes the concept of the Noble Savage being first invented by Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth century in order to glorify the 'natural' life.
