ABSTRACT
As Dore Ashton has argued, European fascination with tribal cultures is generally agreed to date from Montaigne who ‘softened the ground’ for thinkers in the later eighteenth century through his essay on cannibalism, written some two hundred years earlier. Twentieth-century manifestations are therefore but the most recent chapter in a continuous history, not a unique event. At the same time, by quoting the French philosopher’s assertion that ‘each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed, it seems that we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in’, she acknowledges that difference is inherent in this concept: irrespective of whether it is viewed positively or negatively the primitive is always a manifestation of the ‘other’.1 The study of ‘primitivism’ in post-war art has shifted ground from the course it took in previous eras: discussions of indebtedness, expressed as morphological similarities, together with questions of formal inventiveness and expressiveness, have given way to a study of its intellectual basis, for, recently, artists have increasingly come to interest themselves in the belief systems of non-western and prehistoric societies as much as in the material artefacts produced by those cultures. At the same time anthropological theory has increasingly informed their approach to such objects and ideas. Other factors, too, have also contributed to this changing dynamic. The surrealists were not only the first group of western artists to integrate their knowledge of ethnographical material with their response to tribal artefacts, but in their choice of material objects from the Pacific and the Americas they drew on sources which had not previously been appropriated by cubist or German expressionist artists. Conversely, instead of unearthing even more remote or arcane examples as a stimulus, several contemporary artists have reversed the process,
identifying the barbaric in certain debased local modes and finding great sophistication in tribal objects and concepts.
