Please help improve this article by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (October 2009)

A Punu tribe mask. Gabon West Africa

An example of tribal art.

A male Kifwebe mask. Songye tribe. D.R. Congo. Central Africa

Artwork in the Museum of Indian Terracotta, New Delhi, India.^[1]

Tribal art is an umbrella term used to describe artefacts and objects created by the indigenous peoples of (controversially named) primitive cultures. Also known as Ethnographic art, or Arts Primitive ^[2] Tribal art has three primary categories.

• African
• New World or Americas
• Oceania

It can be thought of as folk art, often containing ritual/religious significance pertaining to the custom within a particular tribal culture ^[3] Typically originating in rural areas, Tribal art refers to subject and craftsmanship of artefacts from small-scale societies (tribes), often with no tradition of literacy.

The most well-known tribal art comes from the Americas (e.g., the Inuit, Plains Indians, and some remote areas of Central and South America), Oceania (notably Australia, Melanesia, New Zealand, and Polynesia), and sub-Saharan Africa. The characteristics of a society that produces tribal art include:^[2]

• isolation, political and economic isolation from major civilizations in Europe, North Africa, or Asia
• oral tradition, lacking literacy
• small and independent population groups, normally in villages of up to a few hundred people, with personal interactions through direct contact and a lack of any formal social organization
• a minimal amount of work/craft specialization
• subsistence by hunter-gathering or very small-scale agriculture
• lack of technology beyond hand tools, potentially made of stone rather than metal
• slow rates of cultural development before contact with Europeans

Most important for tribal art are low population size, no use of written language, and lack of contact with large-scale civilization.

[edit] See also

• Antique Tribal Art Dealers Association
• Australian aboriginal art
• Folk art
• John Young Museum of Art, Honolulu, including a tribal art gallery
• Old media
• Totem pole
• The Tribal Eye, a 1975 British television David Attenborough documentary
• List of indigenous peoples
• Musée du quai Branly in Paris

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

• Edmund Snow Carpenter, The Tribal Terror of Self-Awareness. In Paul Hockings (editor), Principles of Visual Anthropology, 1975, pages 451–461.
• Dennis Dutton, Tribal Art and Artifact. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51(1):13–21, Winter 1993.
• Dennis Dutton, Mythologies of Tribal Art. African Arts, 28(3):32–43, Summer 1995.

[edit] External links

• Tribal Art Magazine
• Tribal Arts magazine
• Tribal Art Brokers, Australia
• Paleobree — Tribal Art Information Service
• Tribal Art Gallery, San Francisco, USA
• TAD: Tribal Art and Design Gallery, Santa Fe, USA
• Tribal arts Great Britain.

This art-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e