Ignoble Savage Research Articles

VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF NATIVE AMERICANS IN COLONIAL AMERICA

The article presents some of the most common visual representations of Native Americans from the colonial period and the Age of Exploration of the Americas. Visual representations were a part of a broader colonial discourse and were based on the representational practices applied by the dominant Western European culture. After establishing a broader theoretical framework based on the post-colonial and cultural studies insights, the author singles out and analyzes several visual representations of Native Americans. The emphasis is on the Noble vs. Ignoble Savage stereotypes and tropes and how they are reflected in visual arts.

Unheeded history: screening savage native Americans in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

ABSTRACT This article examines how historiographic metafiction challenges traditional narratives of history. The author argues that subverting conventions of narrating the past through irony and a plurality of truths, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) can be regarded as historiographic metafiction. Its narratives of the past challenge the traditional History, provide alternate ways of telling history and invite a more meaningful cognitive engagement with history. To explore how the Americanization of the Holocaust sheds light on American racism, the author focuses on the figure of the savage Native American in the film and examines how Native Americans are brought into play through a plot that mixes up the histories of American settlers, African-Americans, Jews, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians and how the film screens Native Americans in the sight of psychoanalytic theorist Kaja Silverman’s terms of the look, the screen, and the gaze. I argue that the screening of savage Native Americans is in a constant process of renewal and the image of Native Americans is ironic rather than simply stereotypical, which contests dominant Hollywood representations of Native Americans either as ignoble savage or noble savage and reveals unheeded history.

The Child Savage: Rethinking the Eurocentric Rhetoric of Civilization in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

ABSTRACT In order to rethink the hierarchical opposition between savagery and civilization in Western discourse, Claude Lévi-Strauss brings in the idea of savage thinking in The Savage Mind (1962) and argues that civilized thinking and savage thinking are two parallel ways of thinking. To find out how savage thinking is operative and how the Eurocentric rhetoric of civilization is re-thought in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), this paper focuses on the image of the child savage. Different from the commonly accepted idea that these civilized British children “degraded” into the state of savagery after living on an uninhabited island for a while, this paper argues that the representations of both “littluns” and the older boys as savages challenge the essentialist understanding of the savage as opposed to the civilized. The littuns represent noble savages while the older boys represent both ignoble savages and civilized colonizers. The double role of ignoble savage and civilized colonizer played by the older boys indicates the compatibility of savagery and civilization. The simultaneity of savagery and civilization dislodges the savage from its conventional positioning as a figure that belongs to a faraway place and the past and questions the Eurocentric rhetoric of civilization.

Cross-cultural encounters: reconceptualising shared histories on the Bundian Way

ABSTRACTThe Bundian project is an initiative of the Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council on the far south coast of New South Wales, Australia. Aboriginal Elders and activists working on the project are restoring an Aboriginal pathway that stretches from the coast to the high country. This article examines the experiences of four young Aboriginal men employed to work on the project. Drawing on qualitative research, I analyse how these young men are using and reconceptualising settler histories of early cross-cultural encounters to propose new ways of living well in settler-colonial Australia and to contest the dominant settler historiography that has positioned Indigenous people as either ‘violent, ignoble savages’ or the fading victims of colonisation. In their rearticulation through the project, these stories of early cross-cultural relations are reclaimed as powerful critical histories of settler colonisation. Through this project, Aboriginal people are critically interrogating discourses of settler colonisation while opening up new historical spaces that speak to the ‘truth’ of Aboriginal lived experience in contemporary Australia.

Faulkner and the Native South ed. by Jay Watson, Annette Trefzer, and James G. Thomas, Jr.

Reviewed by: Faulkner and the Native Southed. by Jay Watson, Annette Trefzer, and James G. Thomas, Jr. Anne C. MacMaster Faulkner and the Native South, edited by Jay Watson, Annette Trefzer, and James G. Thomas Jr., Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 256 pp. $70.00. T his volume, like one ofF aulkner' s modernist novels, presents itssubject from a number of perspectives. And the subject is a dual one: Faulkner and the Native Southfocuses on the Native Americans created by Faulkner's imagination and on the experience of the historical Chickasaw and Choctaw who originated (and in some cases remained) in the southeastern region of the United States. The collection brings together a dozen scholars from an array of fields—literary studies, anthropology, history, and Native American (or Indigenous) studies—to address common questions: (1) How do Faulkner's fictions about Native Americans compare with life as lived by Chickasaws and Choctaws and with novels written by authors who are themselves Native American? (2) Are Faulkner's Native American characters "mere stereotypes" (Howe 11) or do they transcend stereotype? (3) Do Native Americans have "a special relationship" to the land or is the "Ecological Indian" (Ethridge 135) another stereotype used "to justify dispossession" (Osburn 129)? And (4) what larger implications do the discussions in this volume have for future collaboration among the fields of southern studies, Indigenous studies, and African American studies? Several chapters measure Faulkner's Indians against external evidence, historical or literary. Ethnohistorian Patricia Galloway compares descriptions of Indian clothing in Faulkner's stories to the reports of nineteenth-century missionaries, observing that in "neither [Faulkner nor the missionaries] do we find an effort to understand how the Indian people who lived the outcomes of colonization . . . experienced those drastic changes." By reading "subtle gestures and non-Anglo habitus" in photographs of nineteenth-century Native Americans alongside archival and other historical evidence (67), Galloway attempts to recover some picture of the real experiences on which Faulkner's fictions are based. Similarly, historian Katherine M. B. Osburn sets Faulkner's stories in the context of the "stories that Mississippi Choctaws crafted about themselves" and of her own account of the Choctaw resurgence in [End Page 375]Mississippi (117). Osburn reads Faulkner's 1934 short story "Lo!"—a tall tale of Chickasaws traveling from Mississippi to Washington, DC, in the 1830s to petition Andrew Jackson—in the context of the ceremony that the Mississippi Choctaws held in 1934 to "celebrate their tribal rebirth" (123). "If Faulkner read any of the state's major papers," Osburn notes, "he knew that the allegedly vanishing Choctaws were in the process of resurrecting their tribal government" (124). Far from vanishing, the Choctaws were pressing their case by turning "the stereotypes proffered by Faulkner . . . to their political advantage" (122), as one Depression-era leader did in quoting a speech from Samuel Cobb, another Choctaw leader from a century earlier: "When you took our country, you promised us land. There is your promise in the book. Twelve times the trees have dropped their leaves, and yet we have received no land. . . . Brother: Is this truth?" (122, 128). Against such rhetoric even Faulkner's rhetoric pales, and Osburn's chapter (like Galloway's) uses Faulkner's work to reveal the perspectives of real people whom Faulkner treats in his fiction. The literary critics, unlike the historians, tend to focus on Faulkner's art, although they, too, often measure Faulkner's fictions against Native American sources. John Wharton Lowe, for example, finds parallels between Native American humor and Faulkner's in his two comic tales about Indians ("Lo!" and "A Courtship"), arguing that Faulkner uses the joke "as a 'temporary visa,' as [Sherman] Alexie puts it, into a culture he knew was alien to most of his readers" (182). While the literary critics (Lowe, Trefzer, Melanie Benson Taylor, Eric Gary Anderson, and Melanie Anderson) produce what are at times dazzlingly nuanced readings of Faulkner's portraits, the historians, anthropologists, and cultural theorists tend to see Faulkner as perpetuating "dehumanizing" stereotypes—of the vanishing Indian and/or the "ignoble savage" (Osburn 120). Conversely, Lowe describes Faulkner's Indians as "multifaceted characters who range from the...

Western Canadian Identity and the American “Other”

This paper investigates the creation of settler identity in the North American West within a comparative Canada/US framework. The creation of a colonial “other” was an important aspect in the creation of settler identity on both sides of the border. It is argued that one particular image of the Native American “other,” that of the “ignoble savage” came to dominate the American imagination, while Western Canadians relied primarily on another image of the “other” in constructing their identity – the image of the inferior American. Whereas American and Canadian settlers both manipulated the imagery surrounding Native Americans to foster a sense of settler superiority, the image of the American as immoral, violent, and generally inferior to Canadians was the most persistent image of the “other” for Western Canadians. Through historical analyses of primary source material such as newspapers, popular fiction, and immigration pamphlets, and analyses of Canada/US relations, this paper explores the image of the inferior American “other” and its importance in the settling of the Canadian West.

Re-Presenting Melanesia: Ignoble Savages and Melanesian Alter-Natives

In this essay, I examine the dominant representations of Melanesia as a place and Melanesians as peoples and how these have influenced understandings of and responses to contemporary developments in this subregion. I begin with an overview of the discourses that influenced the mapping of Oceania and the negative representations of Melanesians. These have, in turn, framed and influenced discourses about and relationships with Melanesia and Melanesians, including Melanesian perceptions of themselves and their relationships with others. Against this background, my focus is on how Melanesians have recently appropriated the term “Melanesia” and are using it in positive, empowering, and progressive ways to mobilize, redefine, and re-present themselves. In the process, they have constructed a pan-Melanesian identity that embraces and celebrates the subregion’s ethno-linguistic and cultural diversities. This is manifested through the concepts of “the Melanesian Way” and “wantokism,” intergovernmental organizations such as the Melanesian Spearhead Group, the arts, and popular culture. Through all of these, Melanesians are “altering” the native and “re-presenting” what might be called the “ignoble savage.” This process and discourse constitute “Melanesianism.”

Difference of a different kind: Jewish constructions of race during the long eighteenth century

Note on Translations and Transliterations Introduction 1 An East Indian Encounter: Rape and Infanticide in the Memoirs of Glikl Bas Leib 2 And Let him Speak: Noble and Ignoble Savages in Yehudah Horowitz's Amudey beyt Yehudah 3 Whitewashing Jewish Darkness: Baruch Lindau and the Species of Man 4 Fantasies of Acculturation: Campe's Savages in the Service of the Haskalah Epilogue. A Terrible Tale: Some Final Thoughts on Jews and Race Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

The Limits of White Memory: Slavery, Violence and the Amistad Incident

This article addresses the Amistad incident, and the evolving way this event was viewed by Connecticut journalists and residents; an examination of the language used in contemporary newspapers reveals why the Amistad story was largely forgotten in popular imagination in the United States until the 1980s, and completely forgotten in Sierra Leone, the homeland of the captives. The Amistad displayed the nation's most racist beliefs, along with its worst fears, in Connecticut newspaper accounts, accounting for the discomfort with which Southerners in particular regarded the case. The rebellious African kidnap victims were exotic visitors to Connecticut, eliciting much commentary about the “ignoble savages” who might be cannibals, but most certainly seemed to be murderers with insight and intellect; more troubling, they were men – this seemed indisputable – and they were fighting courageously and against the odds for their own freedom, the pivotal American value. In a culture that evaluated savagery visually, there was much to identify as “savage,” but, nonetheless, as the Africans came to reside in Connecticut awaiting their trial, they became human beings, with their own voices, recorded in newspaper accounts. They acquired names, translators, Western clothing, English and Bible lessons, transforming their threatening black masculinity into the only image acceptable to white America, “the suffering servant”; in spite of the pro-slavery newspaper portrayal of the Africans as being lazy, inarticulate in English, mendacious slave-traders, a deliberate process of “heroification” of Cinque was occurring. These competing stereotypes of black man as supplicating victim versus black man as intelligent, violently forceful agent of his own fate were difficult for Lewis Tappan and his fellow abolitionists to navigate. The images also brought into question the value of “moral suasion” as a tool, especially when white Americans were faced with the reality of a strong, potentially violent African man. The Supreme Court decision freed the African captives, but set no precedent for future cases, and it did not improve the lot of even one other enslaved soul; worse yet, the returned captives found no peace after their hard-won return to Africa, nor did they choose to maintain their Christianity, much to the disappointment of their American hosts. Furthermore, the unhappy postscript of the Africans' resettlement called into question the value of the colonization plans so beloved by activists.

The Scottish Enlightenment: race, gender, and the limits of progress

Introduction: The Scottish Enlightenment as Historiographic Problem 1. Hume versus Montesquieu: Race Against Climate 2. The Natural History of Humankind and the Natural History of Man 3. Ignoble Savages: a Blank in the History of the Species 4. Universal Prerogatives of Humankind 5. Measures of Civilization: Women, Races, and Progress Conclusion

Native Americans on film: conversations, teaching, and theory

The film industry and mainstream popular culture are notorious for promoting stereotypical images of Native Americans: the noble and ignoble savage, the pronoun-challenged sidekick, the ruthless warrior, the female drudge, the princess, the sexualised maiden, the drunk, and others. Over the years, Indigenous filmmakers have both challenged these representations and moved past them, offering their own distinct forms of cinematic expression. Native Americans on Film draws inspiration from the Indigenous film movement, bringing filmmakers into an intertextual conversation with academics from a variety of disciplines. The resulting dialogue opens a myriad of possibilities for engaging students with ongoing debates: What is Indigenous film? Who is an Indigenous filmmaker? What are Native filmmakers saying about Indigenous film and their own work? This thought-provoking text offers theoretical approaches to understanding Native cinema, includes pedagogical strategies for teaching particular films, and validates the different voices, approaches, and worldviews that emerge across the movement.

Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film

Reviewed by: Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film Chris Stone M. Elise Marubbio Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film University of Kentucky Press, 2006; $30 Scholars have tended to encode the cinematic Indian as male, relegating Native women to the periphery. In challenging this literature, M. Elise Marubbio refrains from engaging the entire range of screen representations of Native women. Instead, she focuses on the “Celluloid Maiden,” an alluring, exotic young woman who engenders her own demise by entering into a relationship with the white hero. As she stresses, the Celluloid Maiden, is neither a static nor a monolithic figure. Variations exist; filmmakers decide which elements to incorporate; their choices, in turn, speak to the broader cultural and political milieu in which they operate. Despite these variations, Marubbio contends that the Celluloid Maiden, as the romantic, doomed avatar of a vanishing people, has sabotaged attempts to depict Native Americans with greater sensitivity and empathy. Marubbio traces the Celluloid Maiden back to the silent era, foregrounding two subtypes: the Celluloid Princess and the Sexualized Maiden. As the female counterpart of the ignoble savage, the Sexualized Maiden, as mandated by her “savage” blood, is a promiscuous, sexually aggressive femme fatale of mixed parentage who threatens to castrate white males. If this figure endangers white masculinity, violates sexual mores, and stokes fears of moral and racial degradation, filmmakers manage these threats to the social order by killing her off. In contrast, the Celluloid Princess “symbolizes the ‘best’ of Native America” (6). She is unspoiled, innocent, exotic, beautiful, and open to engagement with white culture. In “helper” films, the Celluloid Princess, in gratitude for a past kindness, sacrifices her life to warn whites of an impending Indian attack. In “lover” films, the Celluloid Princess marries and procreates with a transplanted Easterner seeking sanctuary in the West. With time, a crisis imperils their interracial union. Either she discovers that her husband loves another (white) woman, or she realizes [End Page 44] she cannot forsake her people and accompany him on his return to the East, or she becomes inconsolable after her husband enrolls their child in an eastern school. Whatever the crisis, the resolution is the same: she commits suicide, thereby releasing her husband from his obligations, facilitating his return to “civilization,” and ensuring the benefits of civilization for their progeny. The Sexualized Maiden and Celluloid Princess each receded from screens in the 1930s (for reasons Marubbio never adequately foregrounds). A lustier, deadlier, more wanton Sexualized Maiden did reemerge, however, in the 1940s. As in the silent era, these films encoded female assertiveness as deviant, racialized promiscuity, conjoined miscegenation with degeneracy, and cast interracial romance and female sexuality as threats in need of containment. If Sexualized Maidens continued to appear through the 1960s, Marubbio argues that filmmakers fused the Sexualized Maiden and Celluloid Princess into a hybrid figure in the early 1970s. The catalyst for this merger was the ascendancy of the revisionist western, which recast westward expansion as a tragic tale of murder and dispossession rather than an inspiring story of progress and nation-building. The Celluloid Maiden in these films, while as sexually assertive as the Sexualized Maiden of yesteryear, earned admiration, not scorn. Filmmakers cast the Celluloid Maiden as a harbinger of the sexual revolution and used her to inveigh against a “civilization” they deemed repressive. On the other hand, while these maidens resembled Celluloid Princesses in that they were full-bloodied Indians of social standing who entered into romantic relationships with whites, hybrid maidens practiced a markedly different brand of assimilation. Rather than seeking acceptance among whites, they detached their white lovers from “civilization.” Yet, for all of their good intentions and countercultural leanings, revisionist westerns, according to Marubbio, were less progressive than advertised. The Celluloid Maiden still died, an outcome that not only perpetuated the image of Native Americans as noble, exotic creatures destined for extinction, but also undercut the revisionist film’s bid to posit Indian culture as a viable alternative to the status quo. As revisionist films attest, the historically and ideologically laden baggage of genre can subtly undermine the liberal intentions of filmmakers. If Marubbio demonstrates nothing...

High Stakes Stereotypes: The Emergence of the “Casino Indian” Trope in Television Depictions of Contemporary Native Americans

Native Americans and race scholars have argued that the media construct and perpetuate racist notions of tribal peoples through images and discursive practices that portray them in very stereotypical ways. In particular, the dialectical “master tropes” of the Noble Savage and the Ignoble Savage have long shaped the cultural consciousness with regard to native peoples. The author examines examples from several recent television texts, including The Sopranos, Saturday Night Live, Chappelle's Show, Family Guy, Drawn Together, and South Park, in which Native Americans are depicted in contemporary contexts and argues that these depictions reference age-old racist stereotypes of the Ignoble Savage while simultaneously working to construct a new trope that she terms the Casino Indian. This article attempts to chart the contours of this stereotype and argues that it suggests Native Americans are once again being portrayed as a threat—the Ignoble Savage of the past posed a threat of violence, while the contemporary Casino Indian image, which articulates with both racist and classist discourses, reflects the fear of Native Americans as an economic and political threat.

The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (review)

Reviewed by: The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific Susan Y. Najita The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific. By Patty O'Brien. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. 338 pp. $25.00 (paper). In her recent book, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific, Patty O'Brien has provided an extensive and expansive discussion of the fetishistic image of island women whose ubiquity in popular culture is at once instantly recognizable and entirely clichéed. O'Brien defines the "Pacific muse" as that "stereotype of exotic femininity" that involves the representation of Pacific Island women as "little brown gal"—exotic, youthful, "unself-consciously naked," "physically perfect, passive, and pleasing" (p. 5). The Pacific muse is a "portal" through which the Pacific past—its historical myths, meanings, and representations—might be viewed. Not only does the notion of the muse reveal how colonial representations of island women "fed the making of Pacific history"; it also shows how this history, in turn, "fed colonial representations" (pp. 4–5). Hence, O'Brien examines the accounts of explorers, beachcombers, missionaries, whalers, sealers, and convicts for their representations of indigenous women while also showing how those documents served as the basis for fictional, poetic, musical, artistic, and other representations. These creative forms fed the further production of expectations and assumptions about the Pacific that contributed to later colonial projects. (So perhaps while the notion of the "Pacific muse" grates to those who acknowledge the gendered critique of the concept of the muse, in many senses it is an appropriate term.) The muse image emerges out of, on the one hand, the accounts of voyages of exploration and contact beginning in the 1760s (in particular landings in Tahiti and what would become French Polynesia), and on the other, a harkening back to the representations of women in the Hellenic revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. O'Brien deftly charts the transformation of this image over the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. She positions [End Page 531] the Pacific muse in relation to anxieties about colonial masculinity and white femininity, showing how the image "contrasts" with and also "absorbs" the latter (p. 4). O'Brien's book contributes to the burgeoning field of studies of gender and sexuality in Pacific Studies at the same time that it broadens the feminist critique of constructions of sexuality and gender to include locations such as the Pacific, a location that is often thought of mistakenly as merely a geographical extension (or derivative) of other colonial sites. Chapter 4, which looks at the notions of noble and ignoble savages, is particularly important because it furthers our understanding of how these concepts were produced beyond the highly masculine notion of "the savage." O'Brien persuasively examines how Western judgments about Pacific Islander women's bodies as either nubile or maternal bodies were being produced in relation to Enlightenment ideas of women. The geographical terrain of The Pacific Muse is broad, incorporating typical images of exotic femininity associated with Polynesia as well as constructions of Aboriginal women, those of the western Pacific islands, and those of Micronesia. At times, this geographical sweep leads to a re-inscription of the type. Thus, for example, the only significant discussion of Hawaiian women comes in the chapter in which O'Brien discusses the incompatible notions of European and Hawaiian feminine beauty. In the process, figures such as Ka'ahumanu or Kīna'u are reclaimed from their infamous "girth" in the following way: "Powerful Hawaiian women such as [these], whose girth was often a point of interest, were revered and courted by the American missionaries of the islands, because their influence depended upon these women.… Transient observers had no need for such diplomacy" (p. 201). The passage reveals a tendency on O'Brien's part to provide brief, summative answers to explain the complexity of Ka'ahumanu and Kīna'u's significance which went far beyond mere "influence" (p. 201). These historical figures become opportunities to reinscribe the Western approach to women as objects of men's evaluative and amorous affections. But perhaps this is the result of O'Brien's particular approach, a...

Hard and unreal advice: mothers, social science and the Victorian poverty experts

Prologue: Victorian Social Science in a Twentieth-Century World Introduction to Victorian Poverty Studies Two Royal Commissions Protestant Paradigms in Victorian Poverty Studies Political Economy and the New Poor Law From Political Economy to Social Science Ignoble Savages on Relief: Social Darwinism in Late Victorian Poverty Studies Science and Pseudoscience in Victorian and Edwardian Poverty Studies Three Case Studies in a priori Social Science Unanswered Questions, Unasked Questions, and an Experimental Counter-Hypothesis Why Critique the Victorian Social Science of Poverty? Notes Bibliography Index

Strangers in the South Seas: The Idea of the Pacific in Western Thought; An Anthology (review)

Reviewed by: Strangers in the South Seas: The Idea of the Pacific in Western Thought; An Anthology Rainer F Buschmann Strangers in the South Seas: The Idea of the Pacific in Western Thought; An Anthology, edited by Richard Lansdown. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. ISBN cloth, 978-0-8248-2902-5; paper, 978-0 8248-3042-7; xvii + 429 pages, tables, figures, maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, US$55.00; paper, US$24.00. In recent years several anthologies have reached the bookshelves(most prominently Exploration and Exchange: A South Sea Anthology, 1680–1900, edited by Jonathan Lamb, Vanessa Smith, and Nicholas Thomas [University of Chicago Press, 2000]), greatly empowering the reader's interest in the Pacific, and condensing a seemingly endless flood of primary documents on Oceania's pasts. Richard Lansdown's collection is part of this tradition, with a notable difference: he limits his scope to Western representations of the Pacific from the early sixteenth century to contemporary times. His educated choice is clearly stated in his admirable introduction. While his concern remains with the outsider or Euro-American view of Oceania, his introduction reveals an intimate familiarity with the most pertinent issues in contemporary study of the Pacific. Lansdown reminds his readers that the Islands were settled long before Ferdinand Magellan's arrival, and proceeds to discuss the most accepted theories regarding this nautical feat. Likewise, he chronicles how European attitudes toward the Pacific took shape several centuries before reaching this ocean, and investigates how ideas of "insularity" evolved during the early modern expansion. Deeply convinced that the Pacific's vast seascapes isolated Oceania's indigenous inhabitants from one other, Europeans often overlooked the numerous connections among Island societies, which frequently stretched over hundreds of miles of open sea. Last but not least, Lansdown engages the thorny subject of contact between Euro-American and indigenous societies, reminding his readers that issues of victimization and human agency are commonly interrelated and permeate the sources. [End Page 275] To facilitate the digestion of the ample material, Lansdown places his excerpts in nine larger sections that follow a traditional but accepted path through Pacific history. From the perception of the Pacific as harboring resource-rich islands and mythical continents, Lansdown quickly turns to Western perceptions of indigenous Oceanians as either noble or ignoble savages, the former influencing enlightened and romantic notions and the latter propelling the prominent mission frontier into the Pacific Ocean during the second half of the eighteenth century. The first section features prominent selections on the British South Sea Company—an innovative approach that unfortunately comes at the expense of numerous early Dutch and Spanish accounts. Sections 4, 5, and 7, respectively, are situated in the nineteenth and early twentieth century when the Pacific emerged as an evident link between the investigation of biological evolution and the understanding of Western conceptions of race and anthropology. These segments represent the most interesting and innovating part of Lansdown's work, situating the Pacific in a larger framework of Western intellectual and scientific thinking about the wider world. Sections 6, 8, and 9 are more chronological, introducing the reader to excerpts on imperialism, the Second World War, and the ostensibly inevitable Western disillusionment with the area. Each subdivision carries a separate introduction that underscores the most prominent issues in the excerpts. Moreover, an extensive and exhaustive list of suggested readings permits readers to venture well beyond the primary sources listed in Strangers in the South Seas. Lansdown's selection of source material clearly favors American, British, and French sources. Some of these are well-known renditions on the Pacific, ranging from the voices of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, James Cook, Charles Darwin, Paul Gauguin, and Jack London, to Margaret Mead. On occasion, Lansdown does not shy away from serving as the account's translator, as is the case with Philibert Commerson's "Postscript: On the Island of New Cythera or Tahiti" or JSC Dumont D'Urville's "The Islands of the Pacific." He also features a few voices that are not commonly heard in Pacific studies, most noticeably several comments on the South Sea Company in the early eighteenth century and Joseph-Marie Degérando's first...

Strange creatures: anthropology in antiquity

Traces the anthropological and ethnological theories of the ancient Greeks and Romans from the creation of the world to the invention of the Americas. In ancient Greek and Roman thinking, whether the world is flat or spherical it will have imaginary boundaries and liminal areas where the norms of nature and culture are thought to break down. Analogies are constantly drawn between 'primitive' peoples at the 'edges of the world' and 'primitive' people in prehistory. Distance, both in time and space, leads to difference, and the idea that strange things happen out there or happened back then dominates Greek and Roman thinking on other cultures. This book examines ancient ideas of the creation of the world, the beginnings of life and origin of species, humans and animals, utopias and blessed islands, and 'barbarian' cultures beyond the Mediterranean world, before going on to trace the influence of ancient anthropological and ethnological thought on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We begin with primordial chaos and end with the invention of the Americas, taking in on the way many strange creatures, among them the noble or ignoble savages of Britain, Gaul and Ireland, the Man-faced Ox-creatures of Empedocles, the Dog-heads of India, the Amazons, Centaurs, Columbus, and the Tupinamba of Brazil.

Killing the Indian maiden: images of Native American women in film

M. Elise Marubbio Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film University of Kentucky Press, 2006; $30 Scholars have tended to encode the cinematic Indian as male, relegating Native women to the periphery. In challenging this literature, M. Elise Marubbio refrains from engaging the entire range of screen representations of Native women. Instead, she focuses on the an alluring, exotic young woman who engenders her own demise by entering into a relationship with the white hero. As she stresses, the Celluloid Maiden, is neither a static nor a monolithic figure. Variations exist; filmmakers decide which elements to incorporate; their choices, in turn, speak to the broader cultural and political milieu in which they operate. Despite these variations, Marubbio contends that the Celluloid Maiden, as the romantic, doomed avatar of a vanishing people, has sabotaged attempts to depict Native Americans with greater sensitivity and empathy. Marubbio traces the Celluloid Maiden back to the silent era, foregrounding two subtypes: the Celluloid Princess and the Sexualized Maiden. As the female counterpart of the ignoble savage, the Sexualized Maiden, as mandated by her savage blood, is a promiscuous, sexually aggressive femme fatale of mixed parentage who threatens to castrate white males. If this figure endangers white masculinity, violates sexual mores, and stokes fears of moral and racial degradation, filmmakers manage these threats to the social order by killing her off. In contrast, the Celluloid Princess symbolizes the 'best' of Native America (6). She is unspoiled, innocent, exotic, beautiful, and open to engagement with white culture. In helper films, the Celluloid Princess, in gratitude for a past kindness, sacrifices her life to warn whites of an impending Indian attack. In lover films, the Celluloid Princess marries and procreates with a transplanted Easterner seeking sanctuary in the West. With time, a crisis imperils their interracial union. Either she discovers that her husband loves another (white) woman, or she realizes she cannot forsake her people and accompany him on his return to the East, or she becomes inconsolable after her husband enrolls their child in an eastern school. Whatever the crisis, the resolution is the same: she commits suicide, thereby releasing her husband from his obligations, facilitating his return to civilization, and ensuring the benefits of civilization for their progeny. The Sexualized Maiden and Celluloid Princess each receded from screens in the 1930s (for reasons Marubbio never adequately foregrounds). A lustier, deadlier, more wanton Sexualized Maiden did reemerge, however, in the 1940s. As in the silent era, these films encoded female assertiveness as deviant, racialized promiscuity, conjoined miscegenation with degeneracy, and cast interracial romance and female sexuality as threats in need of containment. …

American Indians in British art, 1700-1840

Ask anyone the world over to identify a figure in buckskins with a feather bonnet, and the answer will be Indian. Many works of art produced by non-Native artists have reflected such a limited viewpoint. In American Indians in British Art, 1700-1840, Stephanie Pratt explores for the first time an artistic tradition that avoided simplification and that instead portrayed Native peoples in a surprisingly complex light. During the eighteenth century, the British allied themselves with Indian tribes to counter the American colonial rebellion. In response, British artists produced a large volume of work focusing on American Indians. Although these works depicted their subjects as either noble or ignoble savages, they also represented Indians as active participants in contemporary society. Pratt places artistic works in historical context and traces a movement away from abstraction, where Indians were symbols rather than actual people, to representational art, which portrayed Indians as actors on the colonial stage. But Pratt also argues that to view these images as mere illustrations of historical events or individuals would be reductive. As works of art they contain formal characteristics and ideological content that diminish their documentary value.

Who Is the "Original Affluent Society"? Ipili "Predatory Expansion" and the Porgera Gold Mine, Papua New Guinea

The idea of the "ecologically noble savage" once linked environmental activists and indigenous people. Today the concept is increasingly seen as problematic. In the Porgera district of Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, Ipili people confront massive social change brought about by the presence of a large gold mine. This paper explores how Ipili people find some aspects of global consumer culture to offer utopian possibilities for change, while others present dystopic inversions of their own culture. In doing so, it compares Western attempts to understand Ipili as noble or ignoble savages with Ipili attempts to make sense of the material culture and mores of outsiders. It concludes that both Ipili and westerners have unsettling insights into each other's culture.