Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization

Whether a group is defined by secret handshakes or restrictions, such behavior taken to the thoughtless extreme leads to misperceptions of individuals outside that group. The narrowed worldviews that result enhance the domineering group’s delusions of superiority: negative profiling, exclusionary behavior, and ultimately clashes of civilizations. Attorney and Native American Williams relentlessly searches through three millennia of Western stigmatizing and racism—with a concentration on the uncivilized, uncouth, destabilizing projection of the Wild Man or Noble Savage. Williams’s canvas is broad, his examples sweeping: Homeric xenia, or guest-friendship, a bond that separated the civilized from the savage, Hesiod’s account of the Golden Age and its Noble Savage; imperial Roman adaptations of the noble savage concept; and medieval Crusaders pitted against savage infidels; the Renaissance, the colonization of the new world, and Rousseau and the Enlightenment; and ending with the colonial-constructionist “Doctrine of Discovery,” which asserted into modern times that colonizers had superior rights to land occupied by native peoples. Although often breathless, conveniently selective and reductive, as well as inconsistently paced, this can be a provocative contribution to multicultural studies. 7 photos. Agent: Robert Williams, Trident Media Group. (Aug.)