Robinson Crusoe

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Robinson Crusoe

• Bringing Civilization to the Wilderness

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• I have been, in all my circumstances, a memento
  to those who are touchd with the general plague
  of mankind, for ought I know, one half of their
  miseries flow I mean, that of not being
  satisfyd with the station wherein God and Nature
  hath placd them for not to look back upon my
  primitive condition, and the excellent advice of
  my father, the opposition to which, was, as I may
  call it, my ORIGINAL SIN
• --p. 154

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Original Sin

• Robinson Crusoe assumes human nature is fallen,
  but at the same time capable of creating
  civilization
• Original Sin Because Adam sinned, every human is
  born sinful. This concept of Original Sin has no
  exceptions in Michael Wigglesworth's poem "The
  Day of Doom," even babies who died at birth were
  condemned to hell (if that fate had been
  predestined for them). Redemption requires the
  preliminary overwhelming consciousness of one's
  own sinful nature.

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Culture and Civilization

• Crusoe is committed to the project of
  civilization.
• What is culture?
• What is civilization?

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Culture and Civilization, contd.

• Etymology of Culture One of the original Latin
  meanings of the root meant to inhabit, later
  becoming colonus or farmer, from which the word
  colony was derived.
• Thus the word suggests civilization, cultivation
  and colonization.

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Civilization

• Social definition tied to the city
• Those inside were civilized outside were savages
• Civilized people were agricultural, civil,
  intellectual

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Civilization and Enlightenment

• Civilization was adopted by Enlightenment
  thinkers and became synonymous with modern
  socity.
• English texts began to trace the evolution of
  civilization throughout history
• This method of tracing history led to a very
  Eurocentric view of history in general.

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Crusoe and Civilization

• Crusoe cultivates the island in every sense of
  the word.
• He provides for himself through agriculture. He
  plants crops, harvests fruit, and domesticates
  animals. He also drowns baby kittens.
• Crusoe also recreates the insider/outsider
  paradigm of the city (civilization) and the
  wilderness or uncultivated nature (savagery).

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Nature

• 17th century philosophers like John Locke and
  Thomas Hobbes theorized a state of nature, in
  which people existed before organizing into
  states or civilizations.
• Hobbes (1588-1679) wrote in The Leviathan (1651)
  that the life of man in the state of nature was
  solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
• In the state of nature, people are only looking
  out for themselves and thus live in a constant
  state of war. It was necessary to forfeit some
  rights in order to live in a society that was
  safe and productive.

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Eurocentrism and the Civilizing Mission

• 3) Because European nations tended to see
  themselves as the civilized, insider cultures,
  they saw little problem with colonizing the lands
  where other people lived.

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Orientalism

• The literary critic/public intellectual Edward
  Said (also recently dead) coined the term
  Orientalism to describe a process of dividing
  the world between Orient and Occident (East and
  West). Occident really meant Europe and Occident
  everyone else (although Said focuses on the
  English and French colonies in northern Africa
  and the Middle East in his book.)

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Knowledge is Power

• Said Knowledge of the Orient, because generated
  out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient,
  the Oriental, and his world.
• knowledge of subject races or Orientals is what
  makes their management easy and profitable
  knowledge gives power, more power requires more
  knowledge, and so on in an increasingly
  profitable dialectic of information and control

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Knowledge is Power, contd.

• Orientlaism, then, is knowledge of the Orient
  that places things Oriental in class, court,
  prison, or manuall for scrutiny, study, judgment,
  discipline or governing.
• Because Europeans saw themselves as the center of
  civilization, their production of knowledge
  always presumed that Orientals were inferior.