The Noble Savage lurks in the background of 20th century archæology and anthropology, a character who is at one with nature, has no history and exists in a perpetual state.
What Gyrus has succeeded in doing in this extended essay is unpacking the two sides of the argument represented by 18th-century French philosopher Rousseau (“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”) and Thomas Hobbes, who said life is “nasty, brutish and short”. Gyrus goes beyond the soundbites and examines the complexities of their positions, then looks at modern commentators, starting with Pinker and Keeley. Inherent in their work is a belief that by adopting a Hobbesian view of a brutal past, they are questioning the accepted conventional view of a peaceful prehistory. Gyrus argues that Pinker’s view is “just a re-entrenchment of orthodoxy dressed up as a challenging new perspective.”
He concurs with Raymond Kelly, who worked on conflict in ‘peaceful’ indigenous groups, that unsegmented societies do not remove the possibility of war but change its threshold.
The chapter on the ecological noble savage explores the concept of tribal groups living in harmony with nature, and recent attempts to re-examine tribal groups’ relationship with nature to give them more agency.
It would have been nice to see some of Tim Ingold’s work on egalitarian and non-egalitarian tribal societies, or a reference to John Keegan’s seminal The Face of Battle, particularly as Keegan is definitely the Establishment.
But these are minor criticisms and do not take away from a study that grasps the complexity of anthropological evidence and presents an intelligent analysis of the various commentators.
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