12 - Frontiers of civilization

Summary

The previous chapters have suggested that the confrontation between ‘rudeness’ and civilization has been a constant structuring principle in the European mind. The principle has operated mainly in the minds of the ‘civilized’, who define their society, manners and speech by opposition to what they call savage, barbarous, uncouth. This is often the language of imperialism, the language of the victors, whether they are happy with their victory or ashamed of it. Looking at the past, we rarely see what Nathan Wachtel, in his attempt to provide an indigenous view of the conquest of South America, called ‘the vision of the vanquished’.

For the European, then, the savage and the barbarian are the Other – like the madman. They easily become the objects of a mythologizing representation, through which the civilized subject of discourse can express in a potent form his or her fears and desires. European writing is full of the opposition between the rational civilized self and the wild Other, and not only writing, for some of the strongest images are visual. One need only think of the Western, which classically expresses the crusading ambition to establish a garden in the desert, a secure place where families can be raised, homesteads built – and then schools, banks, railroads, law-courts and the other institutions of civilized society. This settled order is threatened by the unruly, incomprehensible forces of Indian life, which must be tamed, driven back, eliminated.