Talk:Noble savage

Widely used trope
It's also a widely used trope, e.g., Avatar being a notable user in recent years but think back to anything featuring "natives", Disney's glossing of Pocahontas, for instance. 14:36, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Avatar's use of the trope is only marginal, the central theme being New Age dreck about the Unity of Nature. 14:41, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Purge the Xenos filth. ТyUser_talk:Tyrannis 14:41, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Huh? 14:44, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The trope is played sort of straight with the Na'vi but then leads on to the New Age dreck. I would say when it comes to promoting mysticism the two are quite well linked. 14:48, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
 * We should have an article on First Nations woo or Native American woo. How many times have I heard someone explain some health practice/dietary thing as being good "because that's what the Indians did." P-Foster (talk) 14:53, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
 * A very specific version of the appeal to nature. If there are many specific examples, it would be worth its own article. I'm sure people getting off their box on Peyote counts. 14:57, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I seem to recall that WaitingforGodot wrote an article about the "plastic shaman" quacks back in the day. 14:59, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
 * An article on the wp:Hopi is on my to-do list, but I want to finish the bloody comet first.--ZooGuard (talk) 15:04, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Broken ref
Why is the Ellingson reference (footnotes 1 and 9) broken? I can't seem to figure it out, but maybe it's just too close to bedtime. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 05:12, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
 * It seems to be some kind of bug with the navbar. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 05:27, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
 * It's a known bug with the "random article selection" thing in the navboxes - it borks the reference count, that's why a navbox needs to be the very first template in the article.--ZooGuard (talk) 11:32, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

When is it romanticising?
In my opinion, "noble savage!" is often used as a knee-jerk reaction to anything positive said of Indigenous peoples' traditional lifestyles especially when simultaneously highlighting the pitfalls of industrial societies, not just idealising their lifestyles e.g. to the point of claiming that their history is free of violence against other groups.

For many, simply stating that Indigenous peoples have admirable qualities we could learn from is "romanticising" them.

E.g. "Indigenous peoples have an extraordinary knowledge of the biodiversity around them and how to make sustainable use of it, and we should acknowledge and respect that." "Noble savage!"

"Indigenous peoples have a much lower environmental impact than we do, despite having had tools that allow them to kill more animals (guns) and clear more vegetation (chainsaws etc.) for a while now." "Noble savage!"

(The article mentions that claiming that Indigenous peoples have a lower predisposition to unsustainably exploit their environment is an application of "noble savage". Sure, there have been examples of that, but they still pale in comparison to what we are doing now.)

--2402:800:6105:E9F3:3469:18D5:D3F5:9441 (talk) 03:10, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
 * also add "actually, life in hunter-gatherer societies isn't as bad as people like to imagine. Food was actually abundant and you don't have to struggle as much to get it as people like to imagine. Also, the risk of actually *dying* from an injury in such societies is lower than people like to imagine, as people do actually care for each other and do know how to do things like set broken bones." "Noble savage! The quality of life can *only* get better in every respect over the eras, so obviously the furthest past was the most miserable!" --82.8.128.180 (talk) 14:23, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Druids by Stuart Piggott
I don't have time to get deeply into it at the moment, but The Druids, by Stuart Piggott, is a book chronicling the belief in Druids, which probably didn't exist in anything like the popular conception — a popular conception that, according to Piggott, an archeologist who specialized in the British neolithic, is almost entirely tied to the contemporary European imagination of Native American nations, especially that myth of the noble savage. He does an excellent job connecting the iconography of European depiction of Celtic "Druids" to what was being reported of Native American utopianism in the early enlightenment, and would be helpful for expanding this page beyond simply documenting the noble savage myth as applied to North America, as it was also turned inward, with local adaptation.

At some point, I'd like to delve into it for the Fakelore page too, but I have to admit that it's a monumentally low priority, and I'm only commenting now to briefly distract myself from other work I should be doing.