Comments on: The Noble Savage

By: Asil mi vahşi mi? « Lady Lazarus

Asil mi vahşi mi? « Lady Lazarus — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:32:34 +0000

[…] imajı gelişti, soykırım sürerken diğer yandan uygarlığın iktidarı genişliyordu. “Soylu vahşiler” fikrinin aynı dönemde doğması tesadüf değil, bu kargaşanın içinde biraz denge […]

By: Asil mi vahşi mi? « isyankar p!renses…

Asil mi vahşi mi? « isyankar p!renses… — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:10:29 +0000

By: Sirena Kata

Sirena Kata — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 23:59:13 +0000

I like your thoughts and ideas and the way you described the noble savage..I was wondering if you might have anything else interesting about “Noble Savage” and it’s concept?

By: Jack Abramoff and the Endgame of America’s Genocide » The Anthropik Network

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:08:42 +0000

[…] So, let’s talk for a moment about Cobell v. Norton. Yes, that Norton, the aforementioned Gale Norton, now Secretary of the Interior. To understand this, we need to backtrack all the way back to the 19th century, and the cascades of broken treaties used by the United States government to rob the Native Americans of their land and herd them onto the reservations that would later serve as Hitler’s model for his concentration camps.1 Part of that effort included the Dawes act of 1887, which took the “Noble Savage” and its implication of an innocent, “child-like people” in need of parental guidance by more mature European powers, to its natural conclusion. Indian land was siezed, “to be held in trust,” but in fact simply opened to white settlers. Yet the excuse for this siezure meant that, legally, the land was still held in trust for Native Americans. Not that anybody really cared to keep proper track of that, since they never really intended to treat the Natives fairly in the first place. […]

By: spike

spike — Fri, 20 May 2005 06:03:25 +0000

going back to my previous thesis that hierarchy and agriculture are intertwined.

Generally. But there are exceptions-
The Harrapan had agriculture, but left no evidence of heirarchy or differentiation.
There are also a few rare examples of unusually rich natural food sources supporting state-level societies, and hunter-gatherer societies that were exceedingly violent like the Ertebolle.

By: JCamasto

JCamasto — Wed, 11 May 2005 05:00:11 +0000

(no)Thanks for sharing, Jason.

-Jim

By: Jason Godesky

Jason Godesky — Tue, 10 May 2005 21:43:50 +0000

In psychology and anthropology, the number 150 keeps popping up, and is a strong candidate for the threshold you mention. I’m fairly convinced that with much more than that, any human population requires hierarchy to sustain itself.

Of course, forager bands are generally capped at around 50. Only cultivation can yield populations so high, going back to my previous thesis that hierarchy and agriculture are intertwined.

By: marts

marts — Tue, 10 May 2005 21:20:46 +0000

Hi Jason,
it’s good to read that sharing may be more natural (and healthier) than society’s penalising norms. Out of interest, my attempts to trace the idea of the Noble Savage (on Google) usually ends with Michel de Montaigne’s On Cannibals, written in 1580 (one of your earlier links had that information as well).

As for Rousseau, in The Social Contract he makes an assumption (which he probably investigates in more detail elsewhere) that “men reach a point where the obstacles to their preservation in a state of nature prove greater than the strength that each man has to preserve himself in that state”. You also debunked the idea that humans are solitary creatures in an earlier post, but there is perhaps something to say for the point at which the small group of sharing social humans grew too populous for this form of “free organisation” to continue. So whereas Rousseau faulted on the side of individual autonomy, I am starting to assume a middle ground prior to fullblown civilisation a little like you are describing it.

Interestingly, one of Rousseau’s main concerns in The Social Contract is freedom - which is what he reckons humans surrender when they form the contract. He tries to find a way in which humans gain this freedom again despite having banded together. If Rousseau was around I am almost sure he would have approved more than disapproved of these views on sharing.