The Myth of the Noble Savage

The Myth of the Noble Savage

Author: Ter Ellingson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001-01-16

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 0520925920

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In this important and original study, the myth of the Noble Savage is an altogether different myth from the one defended or debunked by others over the years. That the concept of the Noble Savage was first invented by Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth century in order to glorify the "natural" life is easily refuted. The myth that persists is that there was ever, at any time, widespread belief in the nobility of savages. The fact is, as Ter Ellingson shows, the humanist eighteenth century actually avoided the term because of its association with the feudalist-colonialist mentality that had spawned it 150 years earlier. The Noble Savage reappeared in the mid-nineteenth century, however, when the "myth" was deliberately used to fuel anthropology's oldest and most successful hoax. Ellingson's narrative follows the career of anthropologist John Crawfurd, whose political ambition and racist agenda were well served by his construction of what was manifestly a myth of savage nobility. Generations of anthropologists have accepted the existence of the myth as fact, and Ellingson makes clear the extent to which the misdirection implicit in this circumstance can enter into struggles over human rights and racial equality. His examination of the myth's influence in the late twentieth century, ranging from the World Wide Web to anthropological debates and political confrontations, rounds out this fascinating study.


Culture and Society

Culture and Society

Author: Nuala C. Johnson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-01-18

Total Pages: 627

ISBN-13: 1351160346

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Human geographers have been at the forefront of research that examines the relationships between space, culture and society. This volume contains twenty-one essays, published over the past thirty years, that are iconic instances of this investigative field. With a focus on four broad themes - landscape, identity, colonialism, nature - these essays represent some of the best and most innovative interventions that geographers have made on these topics. From the visual to the corporeal, from rural Ceylon to urban America and from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, this volume brings together a set of theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded works.


Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange

Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange

Author: Marc Flandreau

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-09-19

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 022636044X

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Beginning with the discovery of a curious plot wherein science became the handmaiden of white-collar crime, "Anthropology and the Stock Exchange "by economic historian Marc Flandreau tracks a group of Victorian gentlemen-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned societies. It explores how the commodification of scientific truth became every bit as integral as financial engineering to the profitability of foreign investment and speculation in foreign government debt. Flandreau underscores the crucial role of finance (what he calls the Stock Exchange Modality ) in shaping the contours of human knowledge and vice versa in an age of mercantile expansion. He further argues that a new brand of imperialism, born under Benjamin Disraeli s first term as British Premier, built on the multiple covert links between the birth of social sciences and novel mechanisms of financial revenue creation and extraction. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican Rebellion or Abyssinian Expedition, for example, they responded and catered to the impulses of the Stock Exchange. The marriage between anthropological science and finance, Flandreau asserts, formed the foundational structures of late 19th century British Imperialism, which in turn produced essential technologies of globalization."


Britain and Its Empire in the Shadow of Rome

Britain and Its Empire in the Shadow of Rome

Author: Sarah J. Butler

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-10-11

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1441116087

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Drawing on new primary source evidence, this volume evaluates ancient Rome's influence on an English intellectual tradition from the 1850s to the 1920s as politicians, scientists, economists and social reformers addressed three fundamental debates of the period – Empire, Nation and City. These debates emerged as a result of political, economic and social change both in the Empire and Britain, and coalesced around issues of degeneracy, morality and community. As ideas of political freedom were subsumed by ideas of civilization, best preserved by technocratic governance, the political and historical focus on Republican Rome was gradually displaced by interest in the Imperial period of the Roman emperors. Moreover, as the spectre of the British Empire and Nation in decline increased towards the turn of the nineteenth century, the reception of Imperial Rome itself was transformed. By the 1920s, following the end of World War I, Imperial Rome was conjured into a new framework echoing that of the British Empire and appealing to the surging nationalistic mood.