Celebrating Pluralism: Ethno- and Egocentrism in Art Curriculum PDF

# Dealing with Our Past: Ethno- and Egocentrism in the Art Curriculum Where did some art educators’ narrow and elitist understandings of art originate? Prejudiced notions concerning race and gender—for example, that great art has almost exclusively been produced by European males—have conditioned...

# Dealing with Our Past: Ethno- and Egocentrism in the Art Curriculum Where did some art educators’ narrow and elitist understandings of art originate? Prejudiced notions concerning race and gender—for example, that great art has almost exclusively been produced by European males—have conditioned our understanding of art. In this chapter I will examine some origins of these Eurocentric male-dominated notions and theories of rigid social ordering, both biblically and pseudoscientifically based, that have influenced and continue to influence today's approaches to art education. We in art education are included among those Garcia (1982) describes when he states that all of us have some difficulty discussing racism and prejudice without being defensive, cautious, angry, or timid. As Garcia asserts, we need to set aside fear, anxiety, and timidity and begin to comprehend the causes and results of racism, prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination, particularly as they affect teaching and learning. The dominance given to Western artistic canons has excluded the art that matters in many people’s lives. Those with power often have used it to distance themselves from various realities and to set up systems that make outsiders of those who are not like the powerful. Even by decontextualizing the study of art and falsely presenting formalist aesthetics as culture-free, those with power have enhanced the status of their own art. In a multicultural society this cannot continue. We must educate students for their multicultural futures. ## Some Culture-Bound Assumptions About Art The dominant Western fine art canons include many assumptions, such as the following, that must be challenged by multicultural approaches to art education: - The best art in the world has been produced by Europeans. - Oil painting, sculpture (in marble or bronze), and monumental architecture are the most important art forms. - There is a significant hierarchical distinction between art and craft. - The best art has been produced by men. - The best art has been made by individual geniuses. - Judgments about art must be made based on such aspects as the arrangement of lines, colors, shapes, and textures; realism and proportion; use of media; and expressiveness (according to preconceived notions of "rightness" defined by experts). - Great art requires an individual aesthetic response; sociocultural meaning is secondary. ## Ethnocentrism Ethnocentrism is an implicit part of racism. As Le Vine and Campbell (1972) note, ethnocentrism has become >a familiar word most generally understood, in parallel with “egocentrism,” as an attitude or outlook in which values derived from one’s own cultural background are applied to other cultural contexts where different values are operative. In the most naive form of ethnocentrism, termed “phenomenal absolutism” by Segall, Campbell, and Herskovits (1966), a person unreflectively takes his own culture’s values as objective reality and automatically uses them as the context within which [to judge] less familiar objects and events.... it does not occur to such a person that there is more than one point of view. At a more complex level is the ethnocentric attitude or outlook that takes account of multiple points of view but regards those of other cultures as incorrect, inferior or immoral. (p. 1) Sumner (1906) was among the first to define ethnocentrism for modern social science, and we do not have to look too far in the art education literature to find what he calls a “view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it” (p. 13). For example, recent letters to the editor of *Art Education* written in defense of formalist aesthetics have stated: “If a color relationship is right in New York City, it is just as right in New Guinea” (Lloyd, 1992, p. 7), and “There is a body of knowledge about the elements of art and the language of vision,... which is being neglected in favor of the cultural/anthropological focus on multiculturalism” (Lloyd, 1995, p. 5). Another writer has suggested that “the trick in art teaching is to attend seriously to the work of the artist regardless of his/her race, religion, sexuality, blood type or hair color” (Feldman, 1994, p. 8). Each group, Sumner notes, “nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders” (p. 13). ## Racism During the European Enlightenment, philosophers generally defined man in universalistic terms of mental and psychological characteristics rather than size, skin color, or religious beliefs. However, this did not prevent at least one from pondering: >I am apt to suspect the Negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to Whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the Whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valor, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, tho' low [white] people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. (David Hume, quoted in Popkin, 1973, pp. 245-246) At this time, Popkin (1973) notes, “the lack of proper intellectual equipment among non-whites became a major basis for judging them in terms of their ‘philosophy’ and ‘way of life’” (p. 248). Linnaeus (1806) is generally credited with being the first to classify the various races, ranging from the animal-like “wildman” through African, American, and Asiatic, to European. Hume’s claim that no nonwhites had contributed to civilization or the arts was taken as established fact. Jews and Catholics or Protestants, depending on who was doing the writing, also were suspect, but it was particularly “people of color [who] just did not have the right things going on in their heads to qualify as man in the philosophical sense” (Popkin, 1973, p. 250). The same was often said of women. European males defined the standards. Although overtly stated here, this sort of thinking has long been covertly embedded in hierarchical and gendered distinctions between art and craft and in much of what has been called the elitist aesthetic and art educational theory. The Western study of aesthetics began during the European Enlightenment. More than 200 years ago, popular books such as *A History of Jamaica* (Long, 1774) introduced European and American readers to such invidious stereotypes of black peoples as “brutish, ignorant, idle, crafty, treacherous, bloody, thievish, mistrustful, and superstitious” (cited in Marsden, 1990, p. 336). How could people characterized in such ways be seen as makers of art? ## Prejudice Notions of the superiority of some races based on craniometry also influenced thinking in art education. As a National Art Training School instructor in art history, Zerffi (1876) had a considerable impact on art education thinking. His *Manual of the Historical Development of Art* is dedicated to Edwin J. Poynter, the director of the Art Training School at South Kensington. Poynter often referred to classical Greece and Rome and invoked “a tradition of judgments, assumptions, beliefs and norms built up from the Italian Renaissance to the late eighteenth-century" (Pearson, 1982, p. 42; see Poynter and Head, 1885). Zerffi supported this tradition with his craniometric analysis of art in a chapter titled "Ethnology and Its Bearing on Art." Zerffi was influenced by two prevalent elements in Victorian racial attitudes from at least the 1850s: “the belief in the natural inequality of human beings, and a readiness to generalize freely about the character of racial and ethnic groups” (Lorimer, 1988, p. 428). If, as Marsden (1990) posits, the essence of racism is that it assigns group characteristics to human beings based on physical attributes and assigns these distinctions some sort of social significance that is “emotionally intensified by location in a hierarchical ranking” (p. 333), then Zerffi’s views about art certainly were racist. As authors such as Bolt (1971) and Lorimer (1988) show, these views were derived, despite claims to the contrary, not from systematic science but from habits of mind shaped by the sociocultural milieu. We know that much Victorian discussion of race took place in a fairly haphazard fashion. Observations of travelers became mixed with common prejudices. These became embedded in everyday conversation, in stories published by the daily press, in discourse at scientific gatherings, and in scientific publications, including those of the anthropological societies that were founded in London, Paris, Florence, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and New York between 1859 and 1870. Certainly prior to 1900, scientific developments failed to counteract the distorting influences of everyday prejudices, and, in fact, actually served to give these observations both greater coherence and greater authority (Lorimer, 1988). Besides citing dubious studies about brain size and facial angles, in the spirit of his time, Zerffi (1876) comments that “the Negro” is “slow of temperament, unskilled, his mechanical ingenuity being that of a child; he never goes beyond geometrical ornamentation.... He cannot create beauty, for he is indifferent to any ideal conception” (pp. 239-240). Blacks were seen not just to produce inferior art but to be inferior viewers of art, and until well into the twentieth century, African Americans were excluded from many museum audiences. During the 1930s, for example, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts admitted black visitors only one evening per week. This may have been a more generous policy than most, because racial exclusion, tacit or open, characterized most northern arts institutions (Coleman, 1939; cited in DiMaggio and Ostrower, 1990). Zerffi (1876) comments that in a member of the racial group he labels “Turanian” or “Mongol,” the “reasoning faculty is developed only to a certain degree.... He excels in technical ability, has great powers of imitation, can produce geometrical ornamentation of the most complicated and ingenious character... but has no sense for perspective and no talent for shading. He is incapable of drawing the human form.” He continues: “Sculpture of a higher kind is unknown to him, though he can execute perfectly marvelous carvings, which, though quaint in design and composition, are wanting in proportion and expression.... Like his facial lines, the roofs of his houses are twisted upwards” (pp. 24-25). Zerffi then praises the art of the white “race” as “the crowning product of the cosmical forces of nature” (p. 26). Zerffi’s chapter titled "Ethnology and Its Bearing on Art" concludes: >Though art, undoubtedly, belongs to the magic circle of the imagination, and the inner powers of the mind, those powers are dependent on our very bodily construction, the amount of brain and the facial angle. We do not deal in mere hypothesis, but submit to our readers a complete theory borne out by facts. . . . The Negro fixes our attention only as savage; the yellow man has a line of his own, and has remained stationary in his artistic development; the white man has passed through the savage stages. (pp. 27-28) It is not surprising that such statements were common when members of the professional middle class saw a future full of worrisome change and potential decline (Lorimer, 1988). Racism and power were subtly intertwined, as they are still today, and fused to reproduce and normalize oppression that served to maintain the power of a few. Even in some so-called multicultural art education, this heritage has resulted in the continued dominance of Western aesthetic canons, such as formalism, and in the perpetuation of distinctions between art and craft. ## Geographic Determinism Marsden (1990) has shown that nineteenth-century essayists, poets, and novelists were attracted to hierarchical constructs. Both the “noble savage” and the “lazy native” became stereotypes underpinned by a geographic determinism that regarded the continuum from sloth to vigor as being influenced by climate. Geographic determinism thus provided a convenient defense for racial rankings. “White people were shown to be advantaged by the energy producing climatic variety of the northern temperature latitudes” (Marsden, 1990, p. 337). Leclerc (1785) was among the first to promulgate this theory: >The most temperate climate lies between the 40th and 50th degrees of latitude, and it produces the most handsome and beautiful men. It is from this climate that the ideas of the genuine color of mankind, and of the various degrees of beauty, ought to be derived. The two extremes are equally remote from truth and from beauty. The civilized countries, situated under this zone, are Georgia, Circassia, the Ukraine, Turkey in Europe, Hungary, the south of Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, and the northern part of Spain. The natives of these territories are the most handsome and beautiful people in the world. (quoted in Popkin, 1973, p. 251) Because these “beautiful people” tended to occupy the colder parts of Europe, geographic determinism was used to support claims concerning the superiority of white Protestants. One hundred years after Leclerc, Isaac Edwards Clarke (1885), a nineteenth-century writer on art education, visited Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition: “There came to the thoughtful observer, a sudden revelation of the relative importance, power, and destiny, of the White, English speaking, Protestant races of the earth” (p. 203). He continues: “Certainly if the cognate Germanic peoples are included, no one seeing the Exposition could doubt that the immediate future of civilization rests with the Protestant White races” (p. 204). ## Cultural Prejudice And Art Education To understand the history that has led us to the deeply embedded racism, egocentrism, ethnocentrism, and Eurocentrism we find in art education today, we must be aware of how European explanations of human diversity became increasingly evaluative over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Given this trend, it is not surprising that educators such as Clarke and Zerffi wrote as they did. Europeans and European Americans of their time were very judgmental about anything they found strange. However, this had not always been the case. Writing in the sixteenth century, at the time of the Spanish Conquest, Bartolome de las Casas insisted: >All the people of the world . . . have understanding and volition, all have the five exterior senses and the four interior senses, and are moved by the objects of these, all take satisfaction in goodness and feel pleasure with happy and delicious things, all regret and abhor evil. (quoted in Popkin, 1973, p. 247) This view also was supported by Pope Paul III and others, but opposing positions eventually became predominant. Popkin (1973) posits that because Europeans had given up biblical humanism (the conviction that everyone is made in the image of God), and naturalistic explanations of human nature allowed for normative evaluation, the economics of slavery, colonization, and gold could be justified: >And to nobody’s surprise, the theorizers. . . managed to find that people with “wrong,” or "inferior" mental properties just happened to have the wrong skin color, or the wrong religious beliefs and practices. In finding this out, the philosophers and natural philosophers were not being aberrational; they were acting as the theoreticians for a major stream of thought that was transforming the universalistic conception of man into a view of the gradations of mankind, a transformation that could justify what was occurring. (p. 254) These were the dominant views when art was introduced into public schools in North America 125 years ago. It is not my purpose here to either judge or condemn the past. Rather, I believe that we need to understand the past before we can expose current biased practices and embrace a future that requires art educators to respect and appreciate students’ differing cultural backgrounds, values, and traditions; to acknowledge that all groups can produce and define excellent art; and to understand that art exists for rather similar reasons in all cultures. We need art teachers who will nurture a classroom atmosphere in which students’ cultures are recognized, shared, and respected. We need art educators who can analyze and pinpoint how and where art education materials are racist and who will develop culturally appropriate curriculum materials to supplement those available when the treatment of different cultural groups is limited or biased. Students can often teach teachers about the arts of their own cultures—in a multicultural society, both learning and teaching need to operate in several directions. We also need to involve parents and other community members in classroom activities, as experts and as resource people. If we are successful in meeting these needs, art education can make an important contribution toward a future in which the humanity of all persons is respected. ## Cultural Pluralism As A Concern In Art Education Since 1951, a few articles on cultural pluralism in art education have been included in the professional publications of the National Art Education Association. Prior to that time, only some minor curricular attention was given to the crafts, usually ceramics and textiles, of other cultures. Stross-Haynes (1993) has documented the antecedent theories, as well as the legislation, that informed some multicultural approaches to art education in the United States between 1954 and 1980. As an emerging concern in North American art education theory, multiculturalism can be traced back to the Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum Development held at Pennsylvania State University in 1965, particularly to June King McFee’s (1966) contribution to that seminar, which had its beginnings in her doctoral dissertation and the subsequent publication of the first edition of her book *Preparation for Art* (1961). This work has been furthered by the anthropologically and sociologically based work of others, many of whom have been McFee’s students. To a lesser degree, a concern with multiculturalism was also present in Manuel Barkan’s (1953) early work and in Viktor Lowenfeld’s work at the Hampton Institute. The increasingly heard voices of nonwhite art educators—brought to our attention particularly with the publication of Eugene Grigsby’s *Art and Ethnics* (1977; see also Grigsby, 1991) and more recently by Young (1990) and the National Art Education Association’s Affiliate on Minority Concerns—have kept multiethnic issues alive. The National Art Education Association’s affiliated Women’s Caucus and the Caucus on Social Theory in Art Education have focused on issues of equity, diversity, and multiculturalism. Contributors to Blandy and Congdon’s *Art in a Democracy* (1987a) and a few other voices (including, since 1983, the *Journal of Multicultural and Cross-Cultural Research in Art Education*, which aims to “promote a greater understanding of diverse cultures and to explore the role of art in multicultural education”; Kantner, 1983, p. 4) have increased our awareness of cultural diversity and its implications for art education. Despite these developments, however, some art education theorists have been reluctant to relinquish power and authority. They embrace approaches to curriculum and instruction in art that still do not sufficiently question Eurocentrism, elitism, and sexism, prejudices embedded in approaches to teaching that emphasize particular technical skills, formalist aesthetics, working alone as both maker and critic, and even in the dominant choices of media for making art in the classroom. Although, unlike their nineteenth-century counterparts, today’s art educators may increasingly see the Western artistic tradition as one of many, the typical reaction to this understanding, in curriculum development and implementation, is still to assign the Western canon major importance and then cautiously add on a few multicultural art examples. Most art educators have not vigorously rethought and revised their approaches to teaching art in an increasingly multicultural and global society. I want to note here that I use the term *minority* in this monograph only when it has been used in the literature I am discussing. It is a problematic term, used more frequently in the United States than in Canada, to describe persons who are somehow outside of the dominant group. I worry that it can be used not only to acknowledge but also to assign minor importance to groups of people and their art. It becomes too easy for art educators simply to add a unit or two, or to find an additional couple of visuals that picture the art of a so-called minority. Much of art education still relies on sanitized curricula in which art, even when it includes multicultural examples, is bland, pleasant, and middle-class. Rarely have dissent or controversy been fully explored in art education, and rarely have the full implications of cultural diversity, and the unity within that diversity, been implemented in today's approaches to art education. ## Conclusion Shapson (1990) has noted that “attempts to implement new curriculum and innovative teaching for multicultural education are fragile. The efforts of committed educators and other stakeholders stand vulnerable to political pressures” (p. 213). As I have shown in this chapter, art educators are also vulnerable to powerful and ingrained hierarchical constructs about racial and cultural superiority and manifest destiny. It can be argued that art education suffers from what the Cuban artist Flavio Garciandia has called the “Marco Polo syndrome.” Often, anything considered different is suspected of being “the carrier of life-threatening viruses rather than nutritional elements” (Mosquera, 1993, p. 35).