Krazy Kioti

A paper on the myth of the “wild man” or “savage” in anthropology, with special reference to the work of Roger Bartra.THE WODEWOSE:
NOTES ON ROGER BARTRA’S WILD MEN
E. N. Anderson
Dept. of Anthropology
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521
Sylvester Woodhouse
San Onofre, CA

SUMMARY  Roger Bartra, in his recent books Wild Men in the Looking Glass (1994) and The Artificial Savage (1997), has brilliantly chronicled the Wild Man, or Wodewose, in European myth and art.  He has connected the stereotypic Wild Man with the image of the savage, or natural man, found in writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the early political economists.  It is reasonably clear that this image, in turn, influenced early ethnology.  Adam Kuper, in “The Invention of Primitive Society,” wonders where the early anthropologists found their conception of savage life.  With Bartra’s help, we can now locate the origin of the concept in hallowed European tradition.  This tradition constructed a mythic savage who was, as Bartra shows, the opposite (often the ironic opposite) of the properly civilized person.  Ethnologists, perforce, made do with this paradigm until extensive field work revealed other, and hopefully more accurate, images.

My book review of Charles Kay and Randy Simmons’ important book, Wilderness and Political Ecology

Wilderness and Political Ecology. Charles Kay and Randy Simmons (eds.).  University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.  Illus., bibliography.  ISBN 0-87480-719-0.

The thesis of this book is stated at the beginning:  “Most environmental laws and regulations…assume a certain fundamental state of nature, as does all environmnental philosophy, at least in the United States….  Included in these core beliefs is the view that the Americas were a wilderness untouched by the hand of man…native people are seldom mentioned….  This view of native people…is not scientifically correct.  Moreover we suggest that it is also racist” (Kay and Simmons, “Preface,” p. xi; their italics).  Native people were considerably more numerous than most writers assumed (at least in the early 20^th century), and were intensively using and affecting the environment.  Therefore (they continue), we must not only change the received wisdom, we must change the policies.  Overpopulation of game animals at parks like Yellowstone, and fire suppression leading to unnatural fuel buildup and consequent conflagrations, are examples of undesired consequences of forgetting Native American impacts and management strategies.  Indeed, humans have been affecting North America for the entire time that the current climatic regime has been in existence, so whole landscapes and even species have evolved in a human-altered world.