Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind

by Roy Harvey Pearce, Arnold Krupat (Foreword)

First published in 1953, revised in 1964, and presented here with a new foreword by Arnold Krupat and new postscript by the author, Roy Harvey Pearce's Savagism and Civilization is a classic in the genre of history of ideas. Examining the political pamphlets, missionaries' reports, anthropologists' accounts, and the drama, poetry, and novels of the 18th and early 19th centuries, Professor Pearce traces the conflict between the idea of the noble savage and the will to Christianize the heathen and appropriate their land, which ended with the near extermination of Native American culure.

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Christopher Smith]

Very dated but quite useful history of the concept of the savage. The author seems almost completely unaware of the importance of biological race as a separate or subsidiary concept. He also uses too much value-laden language. But those things are to be expected from a work this old, and in any case the period covered is mostly the period before race became the dominant analytical category in the 1850s.

In fact, the author's disregard for race is almost a useful corrective to the tendency of modern scholars to characterize all ethnic prejudice as racist in the biological sense. Pearce studies a time when “race” still mostly meant peoplehood, and “Indian character” was thought to be a changeable product of the Indian's environment and his “savage” stage of civilization. In the early republic the Indian was mostly deprecated as the negative image of American Christianity and progress; only gradually did he come to be deprecated also as a negative image of the biological superiority of the white race. (Then again, there were some early references deprecating Indian skin color, though they were perhaps more symbolic than biological. There were also some early prohibitions against intermarriage, perhaps rooted in biblical injunctions not to marry the Canaanites. The preoccupation with skin color and tacit racial essentialism are there long before a real concept of biological race.)

[Brent Ranalli]

Some really valuable insights. Impressive breadth of source material. Amusing how the author starts by saying we shouldn't be too hasty to judge authors of an earlier era... and then offers snarky commentary on much of the "second-rate" material he has set himself to review.