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Concept
Tribal art
Summary
Tribal art is the visual arts and material culture of indigenous peoples. Also known as non-Western art or ethnographic art, or, controversially, primitive art,Dutton, Denis, Tribal Art. In Michael Kelly (editor), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. tribal arts have historically been collected by Western anthropologists, private collectors, and museums, particularly ethnographic and natural history museums. The term "primitive" is criticized as being Eurocentric and pejorative.
Tribal art is often ceremonial or religious in nature. Typically originating in rural areas, tribal art refers to the subject and craftsmanship of artifacts from tribal cultures.
In museum collections, tribal art has three primary categories:
African art, especially arts of Sub-Saharan Africa
Art of the Americas
Oceanic art, originating notably from Australia, Melanesia, New Zealand, and Polynesia.
Collection of tribal arts has historically been inspired by the Western myth of the "noble savage", and lack of cultural context has been a challenge with the Western mainstream public's perception of tribal arts. In the 19th century, non-Western art was not seen by mainstream Western art professionals as being art at all. Rather, these objects were seen as artifacts and cultural products of "exotic" or "primitive" cultures, as is still the case with ethnographic collections.
In the second half of the 20th century, however, the perception of tribal arts has become less paternalistic, as indigenous and non-indigenous advocates have struggled for more objective scholarship of tribal art. Before Post-Modernism emerged in the 1960s, art critics approached tribal arts from a purely formalist approach, that is, responding only to the visual elements of the work and disregarding historical and cultural context, symbolism, or the artist's intention. Since then, tribal art such as African art in Western collections has become an important part of international collections, exhibitions and the art market.
Official source
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