The Myth of the Noble Savage

The Myth of the Noble Savage. By TER ELLINGSON. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 467 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

The concept of the Noble Savage, generally attributed to Rousseau, serves in much recent scholarship as something between a starting place and a straw man: a point of departure which, in Ter Ellingson's study, at last becomes the subject of sustained critical scrutiny. While the title of this substantial volume suggests that what we will find here is a survey of the Noble Savage theory, Ellingson's project is a more layered and skeptical one: to expose the myth of the myth; to question whether Noble Savagery was ever in fact a working concept, or simply an obfuscation.

Persistent discursive fluctuations between idealization and repudiation in encounters between Europeans and "primitives" were encapsulated in the conjunction of concepts of nobility and savagery. Ellingson links the oxymoron "noble savage" to two other myths that have operated dialectically throughout the history of European accounts of cross-cultural encounter: those of the Golden Age and the cannibal. Hc traces the initial formulation of a concept of savage nobility to the proto-ethnographic writings of Renaissance traveler Marc Lescarbot, whose writings promoted French colonial initiatives in Canada. As Ellingson notes, "nobility is a construction not only of a moral quality but also of a social class and hierarchy" (p. 8). Much of the early part of his argument involves untangling the ways in which early formulations of savage nobility were embedded in state and church politics. In a detailed examination of the writings of Lahontan, he focuses on the characterization of Native American liberty and independence as a "rhetorical counterfoil" to aid Lahontan's denunciation of his own, late seventeenth-century French society (p. 66). Ellingson's discussion of the work of the Jesuit scholar Joseph-Francois Lantau draws attention to a...