SAVAGE ANXIETIES

A tidy academic survey of the savage, from the ancient centaurs to today’s indigenous tribal peoples.

Williams (Law/Univ. of Arizona; Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America, 2005, etc.) asserts that the West’s obsession with the outsider, the alien, the barbarian—those living outside of the rule of law, presumed to be oppositional and subversive—has actually helped form by “counterexample and antithesis” the conventional forms of Western civilization. The first savages in ancient times were those depicted by Nestor in Homer’s Iliad, who recounted the tale of the great warrior heroes who destroyed the mountain-dwelling centaurs. Homer’s idea that these half-humans lived outside the inhabited, civilized world has been scripted down through history, allowing what evolved as Western civilization to justify the enslavement of other peoples, wage war against barbarians and stage crusades against the infidel. On the other hand, there has evolved the notion of the noble savage, thanks originally to Hesiod, who celebrated the virtuous, simple life of the yeoman farmer, far from the evils and corruption of civilization. These virtuous primitives can also be traced through Western philosophy in the works of the Sophists, Plato, Ovid and Rousseau. To the Enlightenment mind, the Indians of America acted as “an ideal stand-in for humanity’s first, primitive, backward stage of social development,” ripe for study yet never accorded actual humanity or equality with the white man. Williams demonstrates how colonizing nations continue to use the Doctrine of Discovery to justify their claim over indigenous people and their land.

A straightforward scholarly study that concludes with a compelling look at the pervasive harm in stereotypical attitudes and language.