Is Primitive Art Art?

Abstract

A gratifying recent development in American education is the desire (and demand) for greater multicultural education, including multicultural art education. For too long, the argument is, we have acted as though the only significant contributions to art, science, law, morality, literature have come from Europeans (and mainly dead, male Europeans), thus ignoring the cultural contributions of other traditions, ethnic groups, and the other half of the human race, as divided by gender. This omission is all the more troubling when it occurs in a pluralistic, multicultural, multiethnic country like our own where the students we are trying to educate are of African, Hispanic, Amerindian, Asian, as well as European origin. Insofar as one of the goals of education is to help our students find a viable sense of self-identity, the emphasis on European models as the only or the most worthwhile exemplars is frustrating and self-defeating for many of our students-and thereby for their teachers, as well. The solution would seem to call for the expansion of the curriculum to include a study of diverse cultural heritages. The problem is how best to accomplish that worthwhile goal. One response, widely lauded, is to encourage African Americans to study African culture, Native Americans to study Amerindian culture, Hispanic students to study Hispanic culture, and so on. But this actually defeats, rather than encourages, multicultural understanding, for by adopting this scheme no one is studying any culture but their own. This would therefore seem to be more a unicultural approach, in which each student studies but one culture, the one with which they identify in terms of ethnic origin. It is multicultural only in the sense that many different cultures are studied within the school system, though only one per student. When we think of the goal of multicultural studies as fostering mutual understanding and communication across cultural boundaries, this notion of multicultural