The Ecologically Noble Savage

Abstract

Looking at academic publications in more traditional media in recent years, we find the Noble Savage myth and its rhetoric enjoying widespread popularity in many disciplines. As a pseudological and pseudoscholarly framing device that violates the foundations of the genre it emulates, the Noble Savage enables a unique and interesting variation on anthropological literary style. The creature that seized such a strong hold on the anthropological imagination in the last decade of the twentieth century, as it turns out, was not actually created by an anthropologist: it was “the Ecologically Noble Savage,” introduced in an article of that title by the conservation biologist Kent H. Redford.