Eurocentrism and the noble savage

Type :

Presentation

Pages :

8 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

07/29/2008

Category :

Political science

Sub category :

Social sciences

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Summary :

Europeans of the fifteenth century and exploring the world.
Classical viewpoint on African cultures.
Initial domination by the Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish empires.
How Columbus and his cohorts distorted what little knowledge was available to the rest of Europe about Amerindians.
Michael de Montaigne's 1575 essay.
Evidence that ?Oroonoko? was meant as a humanitarian and anti-slavery treaty.
Crusoe's return to European culture after his adventure.

Abstract

Europeans of the fifteenth century undertook a daunting task: to explore the entire world. Looking back on it today, we can see that the sheer size of this venture would naturally impede the flow of accurate information about discoveries of new lands and peoples. Yet, it seems that pragmatic economic interests were always sufficient motivations for explorers to learn more. For instance, the entire outline of Africa was accurately marked out by the end of the fifteenth century, which reflects the explorers' initial interests in material resources and useful ports, and yet it took several hundred more years for any thorough or factual analyses about native cultures to emerge. Among the latter of such anthropological studies was the idea of the "noble savage," which this essay will better explain after a relatively brief outline of history and a discussion of several relevant primary texts. It will be revealed that this concept was largely a reaction to earlier anti-native attitudes and other injustices of Western civilization, as well as a desire for a simpler, unindustrialized lifestyle. Most importantly, proponents of the "noble savage" aimed to turn the usual imperialist narrative on its head, and often contended that there is no absolute moral system or perfect world outlook. This philosophy, which we today have termed "cultural relativism," is in direct opposition to the ethnocentric perspective, which argues that one's own values and customs are the same ideal for which all peoples of the world should strive. In travelogues and other popular literature of the fifteenth to eighteenth century we can see a plethora of attitudes and ideologies towards native African and Amerindian societies. Pertinent to this essay are those works that contain clear instances of cultural relativism and ethnocentrism. In examining the particular concept of the "noble savage," I argue that although the authors intended to praise native cultures objectively as independent value systems, they instead reaffirmed such cultures' otherness and exoticness by judging on the basis of contact with Europeans and in comparison to European values. It will become painstakingly clear that such authors meant to give the impression that their observations and evaluations of native culture were separate from their own European prejudices and acculturation, but fell far short of such a goal.