“Primitive Fakes,” “Tourist Art,” and The Ideology of Authenticity

Abstract

Over the last decades, a number of writers have exposed the complex ideology behind our construction of a largely imaginary Primitive Other upon whom we have projected either our fantasies of savagery and sexual license or an idealized vision of an unspoiled humanity.' Traditional treatments of Primitive Art have always been a part of this ambivalent discourse of the "primitive," and the best recent discussions of the concept of Primitive Art (Clifford, Price, Torgovnick) are acutely critical of it.2 But if recent writers have mercilessly at