Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization

237 Pages·2012·2.23 MB·English

by  Robert A. Williams Jr

SAVAGE
ANXIETIES
THE INVENTION OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
ROBERT A. WILLIAMS, Jr.

SAVAGE ANXIETIES
Copyright © Robert A. Williams, Jr., 2012.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s
Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a
division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe
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ISBN 978-0-230-33876-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Robert A., 1955–
Savage anxieties : the invention of western civilization / by Robert A. Williams, Jr.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-230-33876-0
1. Indigenous peoples. 2. Noble savage. 3. Tribes. 4. Primitive societies.
I. Title.
GN380.W549 2012
305.8—dc23
2012011360
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Letra Libre, Inc.
First edition: August 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Homer and the Idea of the Savage: First Impressions
2 The Legend of the Golden Age and the Idea of the Savage
3 The Emergence of the Classical Idea of the Savage
4 The Classical Idea of the Savage and the Invention of Western
Philosophy
5 The Idea of the Savage and the Rise of Roman Imperial Civilization
6 Parallel Lives: The Idea of the Savage and the Decline of the Roman
Empire
7 The Medieval Christian Church’s War on the Classical Idea of the
Savage
8 The Wild Man and the Medieval Christian Idea of the Savage
9 The Renaissance Humanist Revival of the Classical Language of
Savagery
10 The Renaissance Discovery Era and the Idea of the Savage
11 The Enlightenment Idea of the Savage and the Founders’ First Indian Policy
12 Savage Anxieties: Indigenous Peoples’ Human Rights in the Twenty-First
Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index
For Joy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many friends, colleagues, and students generously helped me in writing this
book over the course of the past decade. My wife, Joy Fischer Williams, to
whom the book is dedicated, deserves special thanks. I also wish to thank my
agent at Trident Media Group, Don Fehr, for his enthusiasm and support for the
project from the start. I am also grateful to Luba Ostashevsky at Palgrave
Macmillan who provided me with invaluable advice and assistance in the early
stages of turning my book proposal into an actual manuscript, and Karen Wolny,
Editorial Director at Palgrave Macmillan, who came up with the title and also
encouraged me to write the book that was always inside my head. I want to
especially acknowledge Akilah Kinnison, who helped me to edit, proofread, and
cite-check the entire manuscript several times over. I’ve delivered many talks
over the years in developing the ideas in the book, but I particularly remember
the formative exchanges with students and faculty at the School of Oriental and
African Studies at the University of London, organized by Professor Catriona
Drew; at the Critical Race Studies program at the University of California, Los
Angeles, organized by Professor Addie Rolnick; at the National Centre for
Indigenous Studies at Australian National University, organized by Professor
Mick Dodson; at the Native American Studies Institute at the University of
Georgia, organized by Professor Jace Weaver; and at American Indian Studies at
the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, organized by Professors Robert
Warrior and Fred Hoxie. My deans at the University of Arizona Rogers College
of Law, Toni Massaro and Larry Ponoroff, have provided me with invaluable
institutional support and encouragement. My colleagues and students at the
Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program have been a continuing source of
inspiration and knowledge. Thanks to all.
INTRODUCTION
We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their roots in Greece. But for
Greece—Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors, would have spread
no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters; or, what is worse,
might have arrived at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institution as China and Japan
possess.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Preface” to Hellas (1821)
From its very beginnings in ancient Greece, Western civilization has sought to
invent itself through the idea of the savage. We are all familiar with the basic
elements of the idea: The savage is a distant, alien, uncivilized being, unaware of
either the benefits or burdens of modernity. Lacking in sophisticated institutions
of government and religion, ignorant of property and laws, without complex
social bonds or familial ties, living in a state of untamed nature, fierce and
ennobled at the same time, the savage has always represented an anxious,
negating presence in the world, standing perpetually opposed to Western
civilization. As I argue in this book, without the idea of the savage to understand
what it is, what it was, and what it could be, Western civilization, as we know it,
would never have been able to invent itself.
Throughout the book, I tell the story of the West’s three-thousand-year
obsession with the idea of the savage by looking at influential examples,
enduring works, and great thinkers and writers who have used this construct to
reflect on the essential differences between their own seemingly more advanced,
Westernized form of civilization and the rest of the world. Along the way, I hope
to show how the ancient notion of an irreconcilable difference between
civilization and savagery has helped to shape and direct the West’s response and
actions toward the non-Western world from its earliest beginnings in ancient
Greece.
I begin the story with the ancient Greeks because that is where the identifying
markers and iconic imagery associated with the idea of the savage in the West
were invented. Although certainly not racists, as we understand that term today
in the twenty-first century, the ancient Greeks did give birth to Western
civilization’s first and most influential stereotypes of non-Westernized peoples.
As modern social science research teaches us, this type of stereotyping and
categorizing of peoples we regard as different from ourselves can be a trigger for
what we recognize today as racist behaviors and attitudes.1
The term “stereotype” is derived from ancient Greek stereos, meaning “solid,
firm,” and tupos, meaning “blow, impression, engraved mark.” Thus comes our
English word “stereotype,” or solid impression. The Greek neologism does a
nice job of capturing the durability of the mental image left on the imagination
once introduced to such iconic stereotypes as the fierce or ennobled savage. But
the Greeks cannot claim credit beyond these roots for inventing the word.
“Stereotype” is an early-nineteenth-century coinage from the world of printing,
borrowed and made famous by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Walter
Lippmann. Lippmann featured the term prominently in his influential 1922 book,
Public Opinion, calling stereotypes “pictures in our heads.”2
A generation after Lippmann popularized the term, Western social scientists
were demonstrating how stereotypes could serve as root generating causes of
racial and ethnic prejudice in a democratic, pluralistic society like the United
States. Gordon Allport, an American pioneer in the field of racial stereotyping,
defined “prejudice” in his classic 1954 book, The Nature of Prejudice, as an
“avertive or hostile attitude toward a person who belongs to a group, simply
because he belongs to that group, and is therefore presumed to have the
objectionable qualities ascribed to the group.”3 Stereotypes, as Allport and other
influential scholars at the beginnings of the post–World War II civil rights era
showed in their groundbreaking research, play an important role in rationalizing
individual prejudice and bias in attitudes and behaviors toward certain ethnic and
racial groups in our society. They are much more, in other words, than just mere
pictures in our heads. They shape the way we see the world and react to others in
it.
The year 1954 was the same year in which attorneys for the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People argued the landmark US
Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education.4 In that case, the attorneys
successfully relied on research produced by psychologists Kenneth Bancroft
Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark regarding the harmful effects of racial
stereotypes and prejudice on young children. The Clarks’ groundbreaking
investigations, first published in 1950, demonstrated the injurious psychological
effects of racial discrimination and forced segregation on black children through
observations of how they played with baby dolls of different colors. The
children, influenced by the pervasive negative racial stereotypes of African
Americans in the United States, consistently chose to play with the “nice” white
baby dolls rather than the “bad” black baby dolls.
Following the end of the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s, researchers
continued to investigate the ongoing persistence of racist attitudes and behaviors
in US society. This important body of research on the psychological and
sociological processes behind racism continues to affirm the powerful role of
stereotypes in the ways that minorities are perceived and the ways they perceive
themselves. This research indicates that long-held stereotypes tracing back
centuries in our history are powerful forces that leave lasting impressions on the
ways that we see and perceive others in our world who seem different and
strange.5 Think, for example, of just a few of the common images and
stereotypes that are widely associated with American Indians today in US
society and in many other parts of the Western world; they really do not have
“red skins,” few if any live in teepees, they tend to leave their bows and arrows
at home when they go to the supermarket, and when they speak their native
tongue, they never use the words “ugh” and “how.”
In fact, studies by cognitive psychologists and other social scientists over the
past several decades have shown that these types of clichéd and demeaning
images insinuate themselves into our minds at a very young age. Long before we
possess the cognitive ability to decide whether this way of talking and thinking
about others is rational or personally acceptable, a good number of ethnic and
racial stereotypes and caricatured, clichéd images still prevalent in our society
have become nearly ineradicable features of the way we see the world. Through
this absorptive, insidious process, these identifying markers of strangeness and
divergence from what we are used to seeing and experiencing become embedded
as essential truths deep within the recesses of our developing cognitive
worldview as we grow older and mature. Told and retold, repackaged and
rebooted in innumerable stories, books, movies, video games, and other modes
of expression, they become a kind of habitual response to certain events and
chance encounters we have every day with those we regard as being different or
strange. The psychologist Phyllis Katz produced one of the most compelling
examples of the perniciousness and deeply entrenched nature of the stereotyping
process at work in a young child’s mind in her groundbreaking research
published in 1976, more than two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.
Katz tells the story of observing a three-year-old white child who, seeing a black
infant for the first time, says to her mother, “Look, Mom, a baby maid.”6
What is abundantly clear from even a brief survey of their surviving literature,
art, philosophy, and even their great public monuments and buildings is that the
ancient Greeks frequently engaged in the use of what we today can easily
recognize as stereotypes and stereotyping behaviors to describe those they
considered alien, exotic, and strange in their world. These stereotypes and
clichéd notions helped the Greeks define collectively who they were as a people