First Miles Philips, and Then Tony Last: The Noble Savage Myth in Hakluyt and in Waugh's A Handful of Dust

The current television era, sometimes called “Peak TV,” was ushered in with serious creatordriven shows of the late 1990s. The increasingly frequent Indian character type of the manipulative, money-hungry, and usually criminal casino “chief”/CEO simultaneously offers dramatically significant guest-star roles for Native actors and reflects a neoliberal version of the Noble Savage fit for twenty-first century audiences. This article analyzes examples of the “casino Indian: characterization found in the award-winning television dramas The Sopranos, Big Love, The Killing and House of Cards. Adapting the figure of the imagined “Indian” to suit the anxieties of our political and economic moment, each of these critically acclaimed shows have created an image of “Indianness” in relation to “casinos” and thereby have added the casino Indian trope to the long-established line of “Indian” characters crafted by non-Native “experts,” writers, and artists of the stage and screen.

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Anticipating Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the state of nature in the novel ‟Letters from a Peruvian Woman” by Madame de Graffigny (1747)

Bulletin of the Kostroma state University ◽

10.34216/1998-0817-2021-27-3-155-160 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 27 (3) ◽

pp. 155-160

Author(s):

Artem D. Morozov

Keyword(s):

Laws Of Nature ◽

The State ◽

General Interest ◽

The Novel ◽

Main Character ◽

State Of Nature ◽

Inca Empire ◽

Noble Savage ◽

Moral Qualities ◽

Intellectual Influence

The article deals with the novel ‟Letters from a Peruvian Woman” (Lettres d'une Péruvienne, 1747) by Madame de Graffigny, which anticipates many ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, including the notion of state of nature. The main character, a young Peruvian woman, who was taken away to France, embodies the concept of the ‟noble savage”. Unlike civilised Europeans she has high moral qualities, critically evaluates the institutions and customs of her time, and she aspires to the state of nature, though knowledge about this world did not make her happy. Madame de Graffigny uses the Peruvian theme according to the general interest in the age of Enlightenment in the Inca Empire, which was considered as idyllic society, organised under the laws of nature. She tries, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to display merits of savages and demerits of civilised Europeans. The intellectual influence of Madame de Graffigny and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on each other is confirmed by their personal contacts. As a result, we claim that the novel ‟Letters from a Peruvian Woman” was influenced by advanced philosophical ideas of the mid-18thcentury – this text stands at the origins of the concept of the ‟state of nature”, which eventually became one of the main terms of Rousseauism.

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A Myth Rejected: The Nobel Savage in Dominican Dystopia

Journal of Latin American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0022216x00010828 ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 449-470 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Hilaire Kallendorf

Keyword(s):

Noble Savage ◽

Interdisciplinary Study

AbstractThis interdisciplinary study approximates the Columbian interpretation of the Taí nos – filtered and re-interpreted by the Dominican people, through their museums. Cultural phenomena such as vomitic spatulas, ‘talking’ idols, hallucinogens, infant cranial deformation, dances, nudity, sexual customs, punishments, and live burial produced Columbus's tendency to denounce the Taínos in his writings. These texts are displayed in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano side-by-side with anthropological exhibitions. Together, these texts and artifacts become purveyors of an ideology, one which Dominicans use to challenge the Eurocentric, romanticising, Noble Savage approach propagated during the Quincentennial.

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‘The noble Savage’ until Shakespeare

English Studies ◽

10.1080/00138385508596950 ◽

1955 ◽

Vol 36 (1-6) ◽

pp. 222-227

Author(s):

Gösta Langenfelt

Keyword(s):

Noble Savage

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The Nature of Human Nature in Hobbes and Rousseau

The Making of Modern Liberalism ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691148403.003.0012 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Alan Ryan

Keyword(s):

Human Nature ◽

Social Contract ◽

Thomas Hobbes ◽

Good Deal ◽

Social Conditions ◽

Noble Savage ◽

Natural Man ◽

Important Sense

This chapter examines the similarities and divergences between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau with regard to their account of human nature. It begins with a discussion of Hobbes's science of human nature, which is part of his science of nature in general. Hobbes's psychology is in principle reducible to physiology, and ultimately to physics. Self-maintenance is the major imperative facing the Hobbesian man. The chapter then considers Rousseau's claims, which he articulated in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, that men without society must be mere isolated animals. For Rousseau, natural man is not the noble savage, nor is he Hobbes's rational egoist. Both these conditions are social conditions and, in an important sense, nonnatural. There is a good deal of straightforward Hobbes-like utilitarianism in the Social Contract.

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