Woodlands Art
by Steven S. Powers

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously posited the following, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” For most of the modern era this concept has pervasively guided the critique of historical ethnographic and tribal arts.

It is said that the Western concept of art cannot be applied to other, more ‘primitive’ cultures, because they did not share the same language or definition of art, that they had a different construct or were playing a different game entirely—as if one were trying to apply the rules of baseball to making a loaf of bread...

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