On Reexamining Fortes' Data: Some Implications of Drawings Made by Children Who Have Never Drawn before

Abstract

Spontaneous drawings made by Tale subjects who had never drawn before, obtained by Fortes in the 1930s, are compared with those made by subjects coming from the same population who had learned to draw under Western influence. The disparity of styles of these drawings, it is argued, shows that it would be erroneous to suggest that a universal ‘grammar of drawing’ can be derived by examination of drawings obtained from Western populations only. Such rare data from remote cultures offer therefore important safeguards against ethnocentricity in psychological theorising.