In the late 19th century there was little doubt about the gulf between “civilized man” and the “savage,” as anyone reading John Lubbock or Edward Tylor or Lewis Henry Morgan would readily note. Anthropology has come a long way since the cultural evolution scenarios that followed immediately upon the Darwinian revolution in biology. By the time Claude Lévi-Strauss penned Tristes Tropiques in 1955, the tables had turned, with so-called “civilized man” seen as acting the “savage.” Anyone reading Bartolemé de las Casas on the Spanish atrocities in the New World in the early 15th century could have come to the same conclusion. So it is quite un-anthropological today to encounter a poster in the New York subway system about the “war between the civilized man and the savage,” let alone to be urged to “support the civilized man.” Yet, this is the message paid for by the “American Freedom Defense Initiative.”
This is not about the Yanomami, nor the Dani. The “savage” targeted in the subway ad is not an ethnic group, although it seeks to tarnish a religion as though it were an ethnic group. The enemy ideology is “jihad,” but it might as well be head hunting or cannibalism as far as the “savage” label is concerned. As for the “civilized man,” it is the macho chauvinist side of Israel seeking support. Perhaps civilized women in Israel will be exempt from going to the front and facing the bearded clerics or rock-throwing teenagers in full battle gear.
Politics aside, the metaphor here is misplaced. “Savages” with their spears never stand a chance against civilized soldiers in tanks or armed with Uzis. The past wars against “savages” on every continent have been pogroms, not crusades, in which indigenous people have been tortured, enslaved, raped and murdered to make way for the onslaught of “civilized man.” Early 20th century Germany, surely as civilized as any other European nation at the time, produced a Hitler, who targeted the Jews in Germany and Poland and everywhere the Third Reich wreaked havoc as “savages.” The distinction between “civilized” and “savage” is in the eye of the holder of weapons, not a cultural product of progressive natural selection.
Placing politics front and center, support for Israel can be argued to encourage extremist Muslim groups all the more to wage their distorted sense of jihad. The war that has flared off and on since the founding of modern Israel as a Jewish state in 1948 is not about Judaism vs. Islam, but Israeli claims to land vs. Palestinian claims to land. Among the Palestinians are Christians as well, but their anger at Israeli occupation is hardly a case of Islamic jihad. The existence of Israel does not threaten Islam any more than the existence of a Palestinian authority threatens Judaism. The real threat comes from terrorism, whether an individual donning a suicide vest and blowing up innocent people on a bus in Tel Aviv or an Israeli airplane dropping bombs on houses in Gaza. One would hope that the “civilized man” would try to be a man of peace, especially in a part of the world where a religious leader once said “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9).
The current “War on Terror,” that has played out in Afghanistan and Iraq in two costly wars as well as ongoing drone attacks by the United States in Pakistan and Yemen, is not about civilized vs. savage, nor is it understandable in Samuel Huntington’s simplistic frame of a clash of civilizations. The vast majority of Muslims do not support the militants clamoring for a violent jihad against the West, even if most do support Palestinian aspirations. This is not just “any war” as the poster implies, but a tragic political game in which the will to negotiate peace loses out to the age-old “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” mentality. This poster has the wrong message. In any war between a so-called civilized man and a so-called savage, do not support either but work for peace.
Daniel Martin Varisco is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Middle Eastern Studies at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Since 1978 he has conducted ethnographic and historical research in Yemen, Egypt and Qatar. His latest book is Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (University of Washington Press, 2007). He currently serves as editor of Contemporary Islam and Editor-in-Chief of CyberOrient (www.cyberorient.net), the online journal of the Middle East Section of the AAA. His regular blog is Tabsir: Insight on Islam and the Middle East (www.tabsir.net).