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-13 Mapping

The question of difference and separation is paramount in the global discussion of the relationships between "first" and "third" world cultures. It is extremely complex, given the different tensions within the conservative and the radical discourses; given the ongoing, if eroding hegemony of western culture and its current soul-searchings about the appropriate but necessarily still neo-colonialist approach to the cultures of the Other. My subject is not anthropological; most of the artists included here are peers, and work in more or less the same context I do. Yet Levi Strauss's caution to the anthropologist is well taken for the contemporary art critic as well; he admonishes the anthropologist to keep in mind that the values ^[[Don't you mean "value"?]] attached to foreign societies are "a function of his disdain for and occasionally hostility toward, the customs prevailing in his native setting." (Tristes Tropiques, Atheneum, NY, 1975, p.436).

There is even less of an excuse for ignorance and paternalism/maternalism when it comes to the artists of color with whom we share a society than there is in regard to tribal and "exotic" Others who do not live on the same block/same country. (West about totalization here?) In the artworld there remains a divisive either/or attitude toward the Other, whether that means people of color, women, gays and lesbians, working people, the poor... This is often as obvious in the Marxist/social democratic rhetoric of some

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