HA242 Final Exam Notes Vocabulary

Flashcards of vocabulary terms and definitions from HA242 Final Exam Notes.

Edward S. Curtis

An American photographer known for documenting Native American tribes in the early 20th century, especially through his series The North American Indian.

The North American Indian

A 20-volume photographic and ethnographic series by Edward S. Curtis documenting Native American tribes.

The Vanishing Race (Navajo)

A recurring theme and image in Curtis’s work presenting Native Americans as a disappearing people.

Pictorialism / Pictorialist

A photographic style emphasizing beauty, tonality, and composition rather than documentation.

Abstraction

An art style that breaks away from representing physical reality by using shapes, colors, and forms.

Progressivism

A political and social movement aiming to reform society by integrating minorities and immigrants into a unified national culture.

National Assimilation

The policy or process by which minority groups are absorbed into a dominant national culture.

Tribal Cultures

Indigenous societies characterized by shared language, rituals, beliefs, and kinship systems.

J.P. Morgan

A powerful American financier who funded Curtis’s The North American Indian project.

Theodore Roosevelt

26th President of the United States, associated with Progressivist policies and support for Curtis’s ethnographic work.

Quasi-European Ancestors

A term used to describe how some artists and scholars portrayed Native Americans as possessing traits similar to ancient European civilizations like the Greeks or Romans.

Contrapposto

A stance in classical sculpture where the weight rests on one leg, creating a sense of dynamic balance and naturalism in the human form.

American Antiquity

A fabricated concept suggesting Native Americans represent a form of ancient, noble civilization in the Americas, analogous to Greco-Roman antiquity.

Apache

A Native American tribe prominently featured in Curtis’s photographic series, often idealized as warrior-like and noble.

Greek Sculpture

Artistic works from ancient Greece, celebrated for their idealized forms, realism, and emphasis on human anatomy and proportion.

Greco-Roman

Refers to the cultural, artistic, and architectural traditions of ancient Greece and Rome.

Geometry

The use of lines, shapes, and spatial arrangements in visual art to create structure and form.

Civilization

A complex human society characterized by urban development, social stratification, and symbolic systems like writing and art.

Primitivism / Primitive Art

A modernist tendency to idealize the art of so-called “simpler” or “non-Western” societies as pure and instinctual.

Orientalism

A Western style of thought that depicts Eastern societies as exotic, backward, and uncivilized to justify dominance.

Totemism / Totem Poles

A belief system and symbolic art form among Indigenous peoples, especially in the Pacific Northwest, associating kinship groups with spiritual animal ancestors.

Linear Perspective

A mathematical system used to create the illusion of depth and space in two-dimensional artworks.

Ethnography / Ethnographic Artifacts

The systematic study and documentation of human cultures, often involving immersive observation; artifacts are objects produced or used by these cultures.

Cubism / Cubist

An early 20th-century art movement pioneered by Picasso and Braque that breaks objects into abstract, geometric forms.

Modernist Aesthetic Principles

Artistic values emphasizing innovation, abstraction, and a break from classical and realist traditions.

Reservations

Areas of land designated by the U.S. government for Native American tribes, often resulting in forced relocation.

Eugenics

A pseudo-scientific belief in improving the human population by controlling breeding for desirable traits.

Americanism

The ideology emphasizing U.S. national identity, values, and cultural conformity.

Indianness

A constructed identity of what it meant to be Native American, often defined through stereotypes and external representations.

Ethnographic / Anthropology Museums

Institutions that collect and display cultural objects, often from colonized or Indigenous societies.

Ethnographic Gaze

A way of looking at and representing other cultures—especially Indigenous or colonized ones—through a lens of objectivity, often from a position of power.

WWI

World War I (1914–1918), a global conflict that reshaped national borders, political ideologies, and cultural identities.

Nativism / Nativist Artists

A political and cultural stance favoring native-born citizens and resisting foreign influence or immigration.

Colonialism / Colonialist

The control and exploitation of one territory and its people by another, often justified through ideologies of cultural superiority.

Racial Politics

The use of race as a basis for political discourse, policy-making, or social categorization.