Colonizers need mythic savagery to claim civilized identity.

Evidence

Taussig suggests that such terror entailed a trade in mythologies. The narratives of terror that abounded tell us something about the terror itself – they were stories of the savagery of the jungle and the savagery of its inhabitants. The ‘wild Indians’ could reflect back to the colonizers their reality as civilized and business-like only if they were controlled through acts of savagery. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 189

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ logic — how dominant groups manufacture an external ‘savage other’ to stabilize their own image; also echoes Edward Said’s Orientalism and colonial discourse theory.
• SEED: Essay angle: how every imperial project requires a manufactured mythology of the ‘savage’ that the violence itself produces and prices — the symbolic economy of colonial atrocity.