SOURCE: Ellingson, Ter. Introduction to The Myth of the Noble Savage, pp. 1-8. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Ellingson questions the attribution of the idea of the Noble Savage to Rousseau, arguing that the concept is an ongoing tradition and should not be attributed to any one individual.

The Myth of the “myth of the Noble Savage”

More than two centuries after his death, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is still widely cited as the inventor of the “Noble Savage”—a mythic personification of natural goodness by a romantic glorification of savage life—projected in the very essay (Rousseau 1755a) in which he became the first to call for the development of an anthropological Science of Man. Criticism of the Noble Savage myth is an enduring tradition in anthropology, beginning with its emergence as a formalized discipline. George Stocking (1987: 153) has cited a reference as early as 1865 by...