The Myth of the Noble Savage

Abstract

The persistence of the concept of the noble savage as it evolved during the first four centuries of French and English colonization of the Americas is easier to trace out than it is to explain. From its initial appearance in Marc Les-carbot's Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1609), in which the Paris lawyer observed that Indians were “truely noble” because of their hunting way of life (in Europe, hunting was a privilege of the nobility), to today's anthropological debates and political confrontations on the World Wide Web, the concept has had varying degrees of influence, depending on interpretation and context. As Te r Ellingson sees it, the term noble savage was a rhetorical construct rather than a substantive object, and he classifies the myth to which it gave rise as a scholarly hoax that was perpetrated for political reasons. Instead of achieving its purpose, the myth developed a life of its own and became embedded in anthropological as well as popular thought, where it continues to this day.