The Fortune of a Stereotype: The “Happy Good Savage” and the “Pitiful Westerner”

Summary

The focus of this essay is on ethnic stereotypes that emerge in particular areas of group identities, as ideological products articulated through collective representation. The fervid exchange of stereotypes between Western and Eastern Europe has its sources in specific contexts: the two distinct “Europes', historically divided by unstable borders and the purportedly peripheral status and socio-economic belatedness of the latter. Due to the frequent journeys of the Occidentals to the European “Far East', Western stereotypes have been set swiftly by widely circulated texts. The cultural stereotypes I am pointing to - crafted in Romania, a liminal area of Eastern Europe - should mostly be identified as a response to these. The polar stereotypes of the “Happy Good Savage' and the “Pitiful Westerner' represented as such in an insightful series of literary texts, have an interesting prehistory dating back to mid-nineteen century, when Romanian intellectuals educated in Western Europe started building a modern national identity. In their birthplace, these polar stereotypes have constantly been evaluated on rhetorical, ontological and moral grounds. My analysis of both fictitious and non-fictitious texts (novels, travelogues, essays) clearly follows and underlines these levels of stereotyping.