Download PDF Savage Constructions: The Myth of African Savagery

Custom and Myth, by Andrew Lang

Contents:

Savage constructions : the myth of African savagery - Catalog - UW-Madison Libraries

Savage Constructions - The Myth of African Savagery (Paperback)

The probability is that men living in similar social conditions, and using similar implements, have unconsciously and unintentionally arrived at like results.

But any one who is interested in the strange identity of the human mind everywhere, and in the necessary forms of early art, can go to the British Museum and examine the American and early Greek pottery. Compare the Greek key pattern and the wave pattern on Greek and Mexican vases, and compare the bird faces, or human faces very like those of birds, with the similar faces on the clay pots which Dr. Schliemann dug up at Troy.

The latter are engraved in his book on Troy.

Representations of Africans in Western Media

Schliemann found so numerous at Hissarlik. The conviction becomes irresistible that all these objects, in shape, in purpose, in character of decoration, are the same, because the mind and the materials of men, in their early stages of civilisation especially, are the same everywhere. The Greek fret pattern especially seems to be one of the earliest that men learnt to draw.

The svastika , as it is called, the cross with lines at right angles to each limb, is found everywhere — in India, Greece, Scotland, Peru — as a natural bit of ornament. The style of spirals and curves, again, once acquired as it was by the New Zealanders , became the favourite of some races, especially of the Celtic. But it is plain enough that later art has done little more than develop ideas of ornament already familiar to untutored races.

It has been shown that the art which aims at decoration is better adapted to both the purposes and materials of savages than the art which aims at representation. As a rule, the materials of the lower savages are their own bodies which they naturally desire to make beautiful for ever by tattooing , and the hard substances of which they fashion their tools and weapons. These hard substances, when worked on with cutting instruments of stone or shell, are most easily adorned with straight cut lines, and spirals are therefore found to be, on the whole, a comparatively late form of ornament.

We have now to discuss the efforts of the savage to represent. Here, again, we have to consider the purpose which animates him, and the materials which are at his service. His pictures have a practical purpose, and do not spring from what we are apt, perhaps too hastily, to consider the innate love of imitation for its own sake.

Savage constructions : the myth of African savagery - Catalog - UW-Madison Libraries

In modern art, in modern times, no doubt the desire to imitate nature, by painting or sculpture, has become almost an innate impulse, an in-born instinct. The member of Parliament who mimics the crowing of a cock during debate, or the street boy who beguiles his leisure by barking like a dog, has a disinterested pleasure in the exercise of his skill; but advanced thinkers seem pretty well agreed that the first men who imitated the voices of dogs, and cocks, and other animals, did not do so merely for fun, but with the practical purpose of indicating to their companions the approach of these creatures.

Such were the rude beginnings of human language; and whether that theory be correct or not, there are certainly practical reasons which impel the savage to attempt imitative art. I doubt if there are many savage races which do not use representative art for the purposes of writing — that is, to communicate information to persons whom they cannot reach by the voice, and to assist the memory, which, in a savage, is perhaps not very strong. A savage man meets a savage maid. She does not speak his language, nor he hers.

How are they to know whether, according to the marriage laws of their race, they are lawful mates for each other? This important question is settled by an inspection of their tattooed marks. But if both are tattooed with the swan, then the man knows that this daughter of the swan is not for him. He could no more marry her than Helen of Troy could have married Castor, the tamer of horses. Both are children of the Swan, as were Helen and Castor, and must regard each other as brother and sister.

The case of the Thlinkeet man and the Iroquois maid is extremely unlikely to occur; but I give it as an example of the practical use, among savages, of representative art. Manabozho was a great chief, who had two wives that quarrelled. The two stumpy half-figures 4 represent the wives; the mound between them is the displeasure of Manabozho. Further on 5 you see him caught up between two trees — an unpleasant fix, from which the wolves and squirrels refused to extricate him.

The somewhat similar object is Manabozho himself, on the top of his mountain. The animals you next behold 10 were sent out by Manabozho to ascertain how the deluge was faring, and to carry messages to his grandmother. This scroll was drawn, probably on birch bark, by a Red Man of literary attainments, who gave it to Kohl in its lower right-hand corner 11 he has pictured the event , that he might never forget the story of the Manabozhian deluge.

The Red Indians have always, as far as European knowledge goes, been in the habit of using this picture-writing for the purpose of retaining their legends, poems, and incantations. It is unnecessary to say that the picture-writing of Mexico and the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt are derived from the same savage processes. They can draw much better than the artist who recorded the Manabozhian legend, when they please. In addition to picture-writing, Religion has fostered savage representative art.

If a man worships a lizard or a bear, he finds it convenient to have an amulet or idol representing a bear or a lizard. If one adores a lizard or a bear, one is likely to think that prayer and acts of worship addressed to an image of the animal will please the animal himself, and make him propitious. Thus the art of making little portable figures of various worshipful beings is fostered, and the craft of working in wood or ivory is born.

As a rule, the savage is satisfied with excessively rude representations of his gods. Objects of this kind — rude hewn blocks of stone and wood — were the most sacred effigies of the gods in Greece, and were kept in the dimmest recesses of the temple. No Demeter wrought by the craft of Phidias would have appeared so holy to the Phigalians as the strange old figure of the goddess with the head of a mare.

The earliest Greek sacred sculptures that remain are scarcely, if at all, more advanced in art than the idols of the naked Admiralty Islanders. But this is anticipating; in the meantime it may be said that among the sources of savage representative art are the need of something like writing, and ideas suggested by nascent religion. The singular war-picture Fig. Bushmen are tempting a great water animal — a rhinoceros, or something of that sort — to run across the land, for the purpose of producing rain.

The connection of ideas is scarcely apparent to civilised minds, but it is not more indistinct than the connection between carrying a bit of the rope with which a man has been hanged and success at cards — a common French superstition.

The Bushman cave-pictures, like those of Australia, are painted in black, red, and white. Savages, like the Assyrians and the early Greeks, and like children, draw animals much better than the human figure. The Bushman dog in our little engraving Fig. The Bushman wall-paintings, like those of Australia, seem to prove that savage art is capable of considerable freedom, when supplied with fitting materials.

Men seem to draw better when they have pigments and a flat surface of rock to work upon, than when they are scratching on hard wood with a sharp edge of a broken shell. Though the thing has little to do with art, it may be worth mentioning, as a matter of curiosity, that the labyrinthine Australian caves are decorated, here and there, with the mark of a red hand. The same mysterious, or at least unexplained, red hand is impressed on the walls of the ruined palaces and temples of Yucatan — the work of a vanished people.

There is one singular fact in the history of savage art which reminds us that savages, like civilised men, have various degrees of culture and various artistic capacities.

Get this edition

The oldest inhabitants of Europe who have left any traces of their lives and handiwork must have been savages. Their tools and weapons were not even formed of polished stone, but of rough-hewn flint. The people who used tools of this sort must necessarily have enjoyed but a scanty mechanical equipment, and the life they lived in caves from which they had to drive the cave-bear, and among snows where they stalked the reindeer and the mammoth, must have been very rough.

Yet in him we must recognise a skill more akin to the spirit of modern art than is found in any other savage race. He scratched on bits of bone spirited representations of all the animals whose remains are found mixed with his own. He designed the large-headed horse of that period, and science inclines to believe that he drew the breed correctly.

The object from which our next illustration Fig. Eyes at all trained in art can readily observe the wonderful spirit and freedom of these ancient sketches. They are the rapid characteristic work of true artists who know instinctively what to select and what to sacrifice. Some learned men, Mr.

Other inquirers, with Mr. Wilson, do not believe in this pedigree of the Eskimo. I speak not with authority, but the submission of ignorance, and as one who has no right to an opinion about these deep matters of geology and ethnology. But to me, Mr. Boyd Dawkins is right, if the Eskimo derive their lineage from the artists of the Dordogne, then the Eskimo are sadly degenerated.

Then compare the stiff formality of the modern Eskimo drawing Fig. It is rather like a record, a piece of picture-writing, than a free sketch, a rapid representation of what is most characteristic in nature.

Savage Constructions - The Myth of African Savagery (Paperback)

Yet, as may be seen in Dr. The Red Men believe in big birds which produce thunder. We have tried to show how savage decorative art supplied the first ideas of patterns which were developed in various ways by the decorative art of advancing civilisation. The same progress might be detected in representative art. Books, like the guide-book to ancient Greece which Pausanias wrote before the glory had quite departed, prove that the Greek temples were museums in which the development of art might be clearly traced. Furthest back in the series of images of gods came things like that large stone which was given to Cronus when he wished to swallow his infant child Zeus, and which he afterwards vomited up with his living progeny.

This fetich-stone was preserved at Delphi. Next came wild bulks of beast-headed gods, like the horse-headed Demeter of Phigalia, and it seems possible enough that there was an Artemis with the head of a she-bear. Gradually the bestial characteristics dropped, and there appeared such rude anthropomorphic images of Apollo — more like South Sea idols than the archer prince — as are now preserved in Athens. Next we have the stage of semi-savage realism, which is represented by the metopes of Selinus in Sicily, now in the British Museum, and by not a few gems and pieces of gold work.

Greek temples have fallen, and the statues of the gods exist only in scattered fragments. Thus Catlin, among the Red Indians, found that the people refused to be drawn in profile. More than simply a theory of warfare, Small Wars constitutes a unique record of how the British themselves at the turn of the century interpreted their military campaigns throughout the Empire. The following section focuses on what might otherwise be presumed to be a purely technical issue, namely the curious convergence of racist discourse, ballistic technology and medical knowledge in savage warfare.

Only a year before Small Wars was first published, troubling reports emerged from the Chitral Campaign then under way on the North West Frontier of India. The relief-force sent in to lift the siege of Chitral, where a small British garrison was surrounded by tribesmen, was armed with the new Lee-Metford rifle, which was for the first time seeing extensive service.

The conceptualization of non-white enemies within the Empire moreover combined different discourses relating not only to racial and cultural difference, but also to medicine, anatomy and ballistics.

In an article in the British Medical Journal , in which he described the use of expanding bullets on wild game, Surgeon-Major J. Hamilton thus referred to the Mark II: This bullet was complained of as not having stopping power — that is, it passed through the limbs or body without causing immediate collapse unless some vital part or important bone was struck. In European warfare this was of comparatively little consequence, as civilised man is much more susceptible than savages.

Many of the British officers in India and elsewhere were avid hunters and when it came to the development of a replacement for the Mark II on the front-line of Empire, the most obvious source of inspiration was the types of ammunition used to shoot dangerous game such as tigers and rhinos. The bullet that was eventually adopted by the British army in , known as the Mark III or the Dum-Dum bullet after the Indian garrison where it was manufactured, was in fact so closely modelled on expanding bullets used for hunting that Tweedie complained about patent infringement.

Freely available

By this time, the public gaze was fully focused on the performance of the new ammunition and Winston Churchill, who covered the campaign as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph , provided a gleeful account of effect of its effect: The Dum-Dum bullet, though not explosive, is expansive. The original Lee-Metford bullet was a pellet of lead covered by a nickel case with an opening at the base. In the improved bullet this outer case has been drawn backward, making the hole in the base a little smaller and leaving the lead at the tip exposed.

The result is a wonderful and from the technical point of view a beautiful machine. The most memorable event of the Tirah Campaign, which was till then the biggest operation on the Frontier, was inarguably the charge of the Gordon Highlanders at Dargai Heights, on 20 October It was thus something of a shock when details of the wounds he had sustained were later reported in the press: British ammunition had fallen into the hands of the tribesmen who had been using the Dum-Dum bullet against its own inventors: The Piper hero, Findlater, was wounded in the ankle with a Dum Dum bullet.

His bones were knocked to pulp, and it was found imperative to amputate the foot some distance above the wound. Although the public debate about the expanding bullets provided ample ammunition for criticism of the incumbent Government, there was never any real question of its perceived efficacy in savage warfare. When the Dum-Dum was discovered to be faulty, in that it did not always cause as much damage as intended, a new expanding projectile, the Mark IV, was developed — just in time for its baptism of fire in the Sudan Campaign in The campaign reached its bloody climax at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September , when the forces of the Mahdi launched a mass assault over open ground towards the well-positioned ranks of British and Egyptian troops.

Considering the manner in which Churchill had previously described the effects of the Dum-Dum bullets during the Tirah Campaign, his evocative account of the Dervish charge at Omdurman revealed a growing sense of discomfort about the imperial war machine being unleashed: Battalion by battalion … the British division began to fire … until by 6. They fired steadily and stolidly, without hurry or excitement, for the enemy were far away and the officers careful.

Besides, the soldiers were interested in the work and took great pains. But presently the mere physical act became tedious. The tiny figures seen over the slide of the back-sight seemed a little larger, but also fewer at each successive volley. The rifles grew hot — so hot that they had to be changed for those of the reserve companies. The Maxim guns exhausted all the water in their jackets, and several had to be refreshed from the water-bottles of the Cameron Highlanders before they could go on with their deadly work.

The empty cartridge-cases, tinkling to the ground, formed small but growing heaps beside each man. And all the time out on the plain on the other side bullets were shearing through flesh, smashing and splintering bone; blood spouted from terrible wounds; valiant men were struggling on through a hell of whistling metal, exploding shells, and spurting dust — suffering, despairing, dying. Cross-section of female corpse used to test the effects of expanding bullets at the time of the Hague Convention. The bullet expanded inside the body and left an exit-wound 10x20 mm.

Stippled areas show destroyed tissue. Dr A Keith and Mr H. What neither the journalists nor the British public knew, and what is even today rarely acknowledged, was the fact that the Maxim machine-guns at Omdurman were loaded with expanding rounds, making them surely the most lethal weapon ever to be deployed in colonial warfare. Without going into too many details, Broadfoot concluded: The British deployment of expanding bullets was, however, coming under increasing international scrutiny and France and Germany, in particular, condemned their use. The Anglo-German armament race was well under way, and the relationship with France further strained by the Fashoda incident.

At the Hague Convention in , Britain was thus the only nation, apart from Luxemburg, that declined to sign the prohibition against the use of such bullets. On the eve of the twentieth century, the British Government found itself in the peculiar situation of suggesting that two different types of bullets should in the future be used by its colonial forces: Veering on the side of caution, British colonial troops were as a result armed with conventional non-expanding bullets during both the South African War and the Boxer Expedition.

It is often assumed that the experience of four years of brutal warfare during the First World War, as well as the transformation of the political landscape after , led to the abandonment of exemplary violence in colonial warfare. In his assessment of Small Wars , Whittingham thus concludes that: However, the controversies caused by this approach and awareness of the need to win over but not exasperate the people suggests that the idea of British brutality can be exaggerated. Then, as now, military doctrine and practice did not develop within a discursive vacuum. The insistence that ideas concerning race and the bodily alterity of non-white people can be neatly separated from military culture, as expressed in the work of Isabel V.

Hull for instance, is thus ultimately unsustainable. The point is not that scholars must denounce British imperialism as a brutal and morally corrupt endeavour. This exceptionalism is further established in contrast to German imperialism and, by extension, to twentieth century totalitarian regimes. The aftermath of the charge of the Dervishes at Omdurman, 2 Sept. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account.

Close mobile search navigation Article navigation. Abstract Even as a growing body of literature has in recent years revealed the ubiquity of racialized violence within Western colonies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, another historical narrative remains insistent that the British Empire constituted a notable exception to the rule.

View large Download slide. And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. It is no coincidence that Winston Churchill was only too happy to decry the Amritsar Massacre in — as indeed was British Prime Minister David Cameron when he visited the site of the massacre in New Perspectives , ed. Global Politics and Strategy This point is made repeatedly: See Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: This is also the case in American military historiography, although it is beyond the scope of the present article to discuss the parallels, but see Brian McAllister Linn, The U.

See for instance Robert Johnson, Spying for Empire: See also Denver A.