SOURCE: White, Hayden. “The Noble Savage: Theme as Fetish.” In First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, edited by Fredi Chiappelli, pp. 121-35. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

In the following essay, White discusses the history of the Noble Savage theme, proposing that the concept contains attributes of a fetish in the sense that form is believed to reflect content. White maintains that Europeans not only fetishized native peoples, but fetishized their own culture.

The theme of the Noble Savage may be one of the few historical topics about which there is nothing more to say. Few of the topoi of eighteenth-century thought have been more thoroughly studied. The functions of the Noble Savage theme in the ideological debates of the age are well-known, its remote origins have been plausibly identified, and what John G. Burke calls its “pedigree” has been precisely...