V. SUMMARY

A million years ago Homo sapiens sapiens emerged from the Australopithecines, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and so on. However, there is little evidence that there has been any major evolutionary changes in the brain structure of Homo sapiens, or that intelligence has evolved from the ‘primitive’ to the ‘modern’ in Homo sapiens. In terms of technology, development of language, one may say that there has been ‘progress’ albeit violence in this alone and the crisis of modern civilization decries even this statement. In the case of Art, if it is seen as a Creative Act, is there any evolutionary sequence, in a holistic sense at all? Creative impuse in universal, non-hierarchical and non-linear. In this sense Art is a manifestation and movement of archetypes of ‘invisible’ reality. But most academics are not in touch with this cosmic dynamism, this area of the sacred. Art-historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and other disciplines of the social sciences, continue to be governed mainly by Western or Modern alphabets of analysis, of serialisation and comparison of data, and so on, in the study of Art. Today, humankind has lost touch with some internal truth wherein lies the seed of the future; Art seen as an integral vision. Is it possible to understand "tribal" art as a Creative Act within this nightmare of materialism and the despair of unbelief that harshly divides life into various unrelated processes? Given this state of affairs, the plea of this paper is to discuss these issues, and view "tribal" art – qua Art – as integral to life within a non-hierarchical quality that exists amongst all cultures, both of the past and the present.

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