"La Rivista di Engramma (open access)" ISSN 1826-901X

227 | settembre 2025

97888948401

A Presentation of Aby Warburg en/sobre América: Historia, sobrevivencias y repercusiones (México 2024)

curated by Linda Báez Rubí, Emilie Carreón Blain, edited by Tania Vanessa Álvarez Portugal

Versión en español | Abstract

This volume, published by the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, gathers the outcomes of the international symposium Warburg (en/sobre) América: translaciones y proyecciones, held at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo from September 6 to 8, 2017. The initiative was supported by several institutions: the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas – UNAM, the Graduate Program in Art History of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras – UNAM, the Centro de Estudios Mexicanos in London, the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt), the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Max Weber Stiftung in Paris, and the Warburg Haus in Hamburg. Structured in three sections—History, Survivals, Repercussions—the volume offers a selection of essays that highlight the significance of Aby Warburg’s American experience in 1896 for his intellectual formation, and how American anthropology constitutes an essential key to understanding his subsequent theoretical elaborations. Here we present the table of contents and the introductory essay; the complete volume is freely available for consultation and download here.

Table of Contents
Linda Báez Rubí, Emilie Carreón, Tania Vanessa Álvarez, Introducción
Linda Báez Rubí, Emilie Carreón, Tania Vanessa Álvarez, Introduction
I. Historia: un viaje ilustrado en encuentros, imágenes y conceptos
Horst Bredekamp, Aby Warburg: perspectivas de la América antigua
Claudia Wedepohl, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Voth and the Study of Native American Religious Ceremonies
Linda Báez Rubí, Quechmictoplican: mítico lugar de encuentro entre Aby Warburg y Mesoamérica
Isabella Woldt, The Navajo-Weaver. Aby Warburg’s Approach to the Anthropology of Textiles
Spyros Papapetros, Warburg and “The Genesis of Ornamentation”: A (Pan-)American Question
Giovanna Targia, Symbolic Function and Physical Laws. Aby Warburg’s and Ernst Cassirer’s Reflections on Native American Culture
Davide Stimilli, Homo Divinans: Warburg on Prophecy
Johannes Neurath, Aby Warburg y Konrad Theodor Preuss: rituales y serpientes
II. Sobrevivencias: migraciones y vehículos de la energía simbólica
José E. Burucúa, Nicolás Kwiatkowski, Hacia una historia simbólica de los elefantes
Christopher D. Johnson, On Warburg’s Baroque and Two Seventeenth-Century, Mexican Arcos Triunfales
Laura Malosetti Costa, Tabaré: migraciones y ambivalencias del héroe trágico
Philippe-Alain Michaud, Mnemosyne, ou la machine cinématographique sans appareil
Luis Pérez-Oramas, Nachleben en sus campos extendidos: modernidad, cinetismo y humanismo: Pathosformel, forma intermediaria y sobrevivencia antitética
José Luis Barrios, A propósito de la exposición “Constitución mexicana, 1917-2017. Imágenes y voces”. Arqueología afectiva e imagen dialéctica: sobre la curaduría como crítica histórico-política del presente
III. Repercusiones: historiografía, tránsitos y promesas
Emilie Carreón Blaine, Los estudios del arte indígena americano ante los postulados de Aby Warburg: un reconocimiento póstumo
Elia Espinosa, Imágenes y palabras en discusiones warburguianas; tránsitos antiguos y contemporáneos
Didanwy Kent Trejo, Imágenes de la promesa/imágenes que prometen

Introduction

Linda Báez Rubí, Emilie Carreón, Tania Vanessa Álvarez

How important was the anthropology of America,
and why did the founder of the library deem it absolutely necessary.
[…] Since Warburg thanked America for having taught him to see European
history through the eyes of an anthropologist.

(Fritx Saxl, Warburgs Besuch in Neu-Mexico, 1929-1930)

I Precedents

Growing interest in the anthropology of images within the history of artistic production has recognized the historian of art and culture Aby Warburg (1866-1929) to be one of its major exponents [1]. Although the Hamburg scholar’s intellectual activities were conducted on European soil, his encounter with several indigenous people of North America during his trip (1895-1896) drove a not unimportant part of his concerns about the images humans perceive and produce. The transatlantic journey by boat from the old continent to the new, and its transversal itinerary from east to west following the recently opened railway routes of the United States of America, significantly sparked the German scholar’s theoretical reflections on the images that every human being generates in symbolic acts expressing and manifesting different aspects of their relationship to the world. This anthropological dimension represents a transcendental moment for art history and its related disciplines which focus on the study of the image and its processes of visibility, and of visualization. Fritz Saxl (1890-1948), collaborator with Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW), always emphasized to the academic community the importance of Americanist studies to Warburg’s intellectual life [2]. Saxl highlighted the fundamental role that anthropology and early American ethnography played in the methodological development and maturation of Warburg’s proposals, as he argued for the merit of these studies and research to hold a place in the Warburg library [3], in itself considered an “organon” to record humankind’s core spiritual and bodily movements. This appreciation allows us to recover and address the central role the American continent, with its history and people, has in the discussions on the academic and humanistic legacy of Warburg and possible future scenarios in a critique of iconology and of image theories in vogue in a world where the human being—it can be said—is a constant generator of images.

Under the title Aby Warburg on/about America: History, Survivals, and Repercussions this volume in three parts reopens discussion on the American theme in Warburg’s work [4]. The essays in the first section, History, present a historical reconstruction of Aby Warburg’s American journey and discuss the significant impact the American experience had on Warburg until his death. Based on archival sources, they shed light on the people, studies, academic institutions, and matters related to early American ethnology and archaeological research on ancient America. The second part, Survivals, engages with theoretical concepts derived and crystallized from Warburg’s American experience; its texts experiment with theoretical concepts’ operability in Latin-American topics that span different phases from its early visual history to its contemporary artistic and curatorial practices. The third part, Repercussions, groups diverse texts that analyze the History and Survivals to build platforms for reflection. They offer a retrospective exercise, which analyzed detects, makes clear, and signals potential routes to further the study of the American theme in Warburg.

The publication of the academic research joined in this volume aims to reexamine and reevaluate the role of Warburg’s American experience in his work and to explore its repercussions in Americanist studies. To achieve this goal, it is essential to reconstruct the trajectory the Hamburg scholar followed along the American Southwest (northwest Mexico): to explore his confluence with Americanist studies and the dialogue he established with the disciplines’ most prominent figures of the time, and to examine the impact of his legacy on current Latin American discourses [5], which have found in Warburg’s ideas the basis for their reflection on Latin American images and imaginaries [6]. This will position Warburg at the center of an academic setting conformed by diverse Latin American, North American, and European academic isles. On one side, it is about looking at and reflecting on Warburg’s journey through the American territory from the new perspective afforded by the revision of until now unpublished archival material. This compels the historical and cultural recontextualization of Warburg’s observations, recognizing his articulations, opening new formulations from which to question and discuss his work within the academic context, which saw the cementing of Americanist studies on research of the ancestral cultures settled along the American continent. On the other, it is about expanding the panorama and giving presence to Latin American discourses that operate with methodological proposals and key concepts forged by Warburg, which to date, have received scant attention and resonance in the dialogues between European and North American Warburgian circles [7]. Nevertheless, these discourses were profuse in the dynamics of Latin American academia once the Warburgian boom occurred encouraged by different translations of Warburg’s writings to Spanish. It took off in the late 1990s with German scholars’ reevaluation of his writings [8], although for the wide academic world, the impulse of the first translations to other languages was most significant [9].They fostered the recovery of Warburg’s reflections on images and of the terminology he coined—survival (Nachleben), pathos formula (Pathosformel), image vehicles (Bildervehikel), moving images (bewegte Bilder)—to make them operative to the practice of an iconology different to the one proposed by Erwin Panofsky (1892- 1968) with which art history had been mostly practiced [10]. Giving rise to a revitalizing impulse for reflection on the phenomena as well as on the techniques of modern and contemporary visual production. Such was the case of French studies by Philippe-Alain Michaud and Georges Didi-Huberman [11], which in Latin American circles were better received than those by German scholars—mostly due to a greater familiarity with the French language—. Otherwise, studies by José Emilio Burucúa were seminal for the creation of a Latin American academia that operated following Warburg’s legacy reflecting South American political-iconological history [12]. Additionally, the interest focused on the image, its conditions of visibility, presence, and perception as well as its visual transmission and capacity to generate knowledge, developed by the pictorial, iconic, and visual turns, recognized in Warburg’s articulations a theoretical potential to reflect on images [13].

It is necessary to develop a critical evaluation that situates Warburg’s connection to his time’s Americanist studies, and to place him before contemporary Latin American discourse’s development of his legacy, as it is a pending task for studies focused on his American experience [14]. The researches in this volume do not aim to thoroughly fulfill said task, instead, they focus on something simpler: they begin to outline a cultural interest more extensive than that which Warburg held when he traveled across the American continent in the forging of his iconic-theoretical proposals, to introduce topics that through intercultural and transoceanic dialogue, open horizons and raise novel questions grounded on a wide ranging thematic and theoretical reflection [15].

II Motivation

Why is it important to keep inquiring on Warburg’s treatment of the American theme, given the considerable attention the subject has received during past decades? Precisely to correct the almost exclusive view cast on the so-called ‘Serpent ritual’ would be setting off from a different perspective. Only a glance at the rich archive held at the Warburg Institute in London, reveals that Warburg’s American experience which started with his trip to America revolved around diverse themes and questions. While many of them focused on specific topics such as the ornamental shapes in a variety of media (pottery, textiles, painting); and the ritual life expressed in diverse dances (Antelope, Snake, and Humis Kachina) through which he explored the religious celebrations together with their performative aspect, as well as the role that artistic creation had as a promoter of cultural processes, it is necessary to note that Warburg’s interest in American themes is part of a much larger network of Americanist scholars than was previously thought, as the contributions gathered in this volume show. Warburg’s dialogue with the Americanists’ proposals, as the fertile field of information he obtained to develop his theoretical reflections on the image, can be reconstructed from a rich legacy. It consists of numerous notes, letters, visual material (photographs, drawings, postcards), fragments of texts presented at conferences and exhibitions upon his return to Europe; an interest that wanes over the years and apparently disappears—understood to be the end of his Americanist studies—but that he later resumed, analyzed and thematized in the famous lecture that Warburg gave April 1923 during his convalescence at the Bellevue clinic in Kreuzlingen to demonstrate his ability to work. From then on and until the end of his days, his interest in Americanist studies a basso continuo that would never completely disappear, as evidenced by his intention to undertake a second trip to America to participate in the International Congress of Americanists (New York, 1928), as well as by his plans to welcome the Americanists to the famous Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW) for the 1930 Congress of Americanists in Hamburg (1930) where he was to present his research. It seems the fact the Kreuzlingen conference turned out to be Warburg’s best-known work on the American theme, to become one of his most widely read texts despite his wish not to publish it [16], contributed to it being considered a pars pro toto to become paradigmatic of an experience that had transpired twenty-seven years earlier, and which at the time Warburg had nevertheless documented with more extensive and heterogeneous material [17]. The decision to posthumously publish the lecture presented in 1923 and its photographs obeyed, on one side, Warburg’s relatives and collaborators’ decision to include unpublished conferences in the edition of Warburg’s Collected Works (Gesammelte Schriften) [18]. On the other, it seems it answered to an effort to present the spectrum of the interests and methodical approaches contained in the research material of the founder of the library that emigrated to London on two cargo ships in 1933; and whose methodological and thematic proposals settled on British territory stirring interest in English academia [19]. The text, published posthumously in English under the title A Lecture on the Serpent Ritual in the “Journal of the Warburg Institute” (1938), is a reconstruction carried out by Gertrud Bing and Fritz Saxl—from material Warburg had used for the Kreuzlingen conference—, the title and the material chosen, a paradigmatic coinage of Warburg’s Americanist studies [20]. It was not until the 1980s, with Italian academia´s interest in the Italian translation by Gianni Carchia (1984) [21] and later with Ulrich Raulff ’s German version of the text (1988) [22], that the text gained new vitality in the horizon of critique as it contemplated on what Warburg had wanted to see in the religious rituals of Indigenous American people and on how he saw that reflected in his studies on the Renaissance [23]. The success of Raulff ’s edition, which contextualized the conference in the frame of Warburg’s clinical history, in addition to showing the parallel interest for ethnological and artistic objects [24], of the periods’ avante-garde, was not only evinced by its varied subsequent translations to English (1995) [25], French (2003) [26] and Spanish (2005) [27], among other; as furthermore, it prompted the publication of another collection of diverse fragments associated with the American trip. These publications gradually portrayed the heterogeneity of Warburg’s material, as recorded by Philippe-Alain Michaud in French (1998) [28] and Maurizio Ghelardi in Italian (2006)[29] as well as the wide network of scholars who were in communication with Warburg, for example, Benedetta Cestelli (2006) [30] presented part of Warburg’s correspondence with the ethnologist Franz Boas, while Davide Stimilli (2005) documented the exchange between the sociologist Edwin Seligman and Warburg on the matter of his anticipated second visit to America, planned for 1928 [31]. Moreover, a series of critical essays in the volume coordinated by Cora Bender (2007) focus their attention on Warburg’s material collected between 1890 and 1930 on the Hopi peoples’ snake ritual (Hopituh Shinumu) that granted further understanding of the historical context in which Warburg came to know the ritua [32]. The German edition coordinated by Sigrid Weigel (2010) included, for the first time, the manuscript version that served as the basis for the conferences Warburg delivered upon his return to Europe in 1897 before the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Amateur Photographie in Hamburg and the Amerikanistenclub and the Freie Photographische Vereinigung in Berlin [33], as well as two manuscript versions of the Kreuzlingen conference with Warburg’s annotations, a volume which with Maurizio Ghelardi’s version (2006), prompted the dismantling of the unequivocal title The Serpent Ritual to restore it to be Images and/or Travel Memories of the region of the Pueblo Indians of North America [34], opening another panorama to what had caught Warburg’s attention. Furthermore, it is necessary to also mention studies by Benedetta Cestelli and Nicholas Mann (1998), as well as those by Ghelardi on the photographic material that Warburg gathered during his journey for they reveal an aspect of the dimension of the rich visual record (photographs and postcards) safeguarded in the archive of the Warburg Institute [35]. Recently, Christina Chávez and Uwe Fleckner (2018) carried out a major evaluation in an edition reconstructing Warburg’s journey. They took on the task of integrating the photographs that accompanied the manuscript that served as the basis for Warburg’s series of conferences in 1897 [36], and included drawings of the objects Warburg acquired during his stay in America and which he donated to Hamburg’s Völkerkunde Museum in 1902, now the MARKK Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt [37].

Consonant with, and thanks to these publications it is possible to grasp an idea concerning the material’s dissemination as well as the complexity of its reconstruction given the fragmentary nature of the Americana conglomeration, which not only focuses on the Snake Dance Ritual (although it is an obsessive topic for Warburg). Certainly, recent editions in part mitigate in part these arduous difficulties, and in their variety, they have contributed to gradually clarify the panorama by subjecting the material to a more open and differentiated critique. As part of this, Warburg’s visit to the American Southwest stands out as a phase that opened the time’s German-speaking art history to alternative and new perspectives [38], while have not ceased to be addressed the shortcomings of his encounter with Indigenous American people [39]. These shortcomings are the product of the Western perspective characteristic of early anthropology, rooted in the ethnology conducted at the end of the nineteenth century by several nations’ colonizing efforts that violently burst into indigenous groups’ cultural sphere while they also answer to collecting practices forged by the time’s institutional policies, as seen in both schools which Warburg was in contact with, the North American and the German [40]. Paradoxically, there have been discussions on the flaws in Warburg’s approach to the American Indian populations, but not so on contemporary criticism that reflects on his legacy. Formulated for the most part from an Anglo-American or European academic perspective which does not engage in conversation with proposals offered by Ibero America and, it must be said, on a lack of knowledge of several aspects of Warburg’s journey and of the people who welcomed him. In this sense, research that sheds light on interests and motives beyond what is already known, as on the projection of what historical reconstructions, or the development of theoretical postulates, might reach when facing an American problematic with an inclusive character and orientation is overdue [41]. By this we mean it is necessary to reflect on Warburg’s interest in the cultures settled beyond the American Southwest, south of the continent in all its extension, to what is now known as Mexico, Central America and the area spanning South America, as to this day it is medullar to the conformation of Ibero American culture in its play of tensions between the inheritance of the past and its insertion to the present in the forging of an identity discourse. This surfaces, both historically and contemporarily. An inclusive view would overcome the academic bias in Warburgian studies in favor of the re-establishment of a broader and more differentiated network of contacts and cultural heritages, to then act under two substantial mottos that run through Warburg’s legacy and that have served as the spearhead to the opening of new disciplinary horizons in image studies: migration routes (Wanderstrassen) and the expansion of borders (Grenzerweiterung).

III. Proposals

Warburg had planned a second trip to America to present the conference titled “The importance of Americanistic for a history of art oriented to cultural knowledge” (Die Bedetung der Amerikanistik für eine kulturwissenschaftliche gerichtete Kunsgeschichte) [42], at the 23rd International Congress of Americanists in New York (1928). It is not difficult to think that given his interest, Warburg’s route might have extended towards Mexican territory as had that of some Americanists, such as Eduard Seler and his wife Caecilia Seler-Sachs, decades earlier following the railroad routes that linked both countries at that time [43]: A journey through indigenous cultural settlements from north to south, and then to Mexico City.

Warburg did not make the longed-for trip, but this volume’s collaborators did, journeying from the Warburg House in Hamburg and the Warburg Library in London, as well as from other European and American latitudes to Mexico City, to fulfill Warburg’s aspiration and develop proposals surrounding Warburg’s legacy in America, thereby following the course that Fritz Saxl had once urged others to take. The authors gathered in this volume traveled through Mexico City and its surroundings; visiting some of the places that Warburg surely would have been interested in seeing, as well as others: the Basilica of Guadalupe, the collections of the National Museum of Anthropology, the Museo Nacional del Virreinato, and the pyramids of Teotihuacan. Upon request of some of our collaborators, who filled with expectations were visiting Mexico City for the first time, we boarded Xochimilco’s trajineras, attended a wrestling match at the Arena México, and listened to Mariachi music at Plaza Garibaldi, highpoints to any trip to Mexico City.

Looking back, more than once we found ourselves thinking about what we shared, and in every case, we can avow that the forces of nature set the encounter in a difficult position: a magnitude 8.2 earthquake on September 7th, 2017, at 11:49 p.m. plus the torrential rains flooding the city the night before. How did we face the forces of nature that struck us? A few years later, after several work phases and communicating at different times with the authors who collaborated with this volume, it is reasonable to think they carry the imprint of this highly emotional experience. At the same time, it is possible to imagine that each retrieves these routes with their text articulating, in their manner, the trajectory Warburg delineated in his sketch of a personal cartography, as reproduced on this book’s cover.

In this sense, Horst Bredekamp’s text introduces the general theme under the title Aby Warburg. Perspectives of ancient America, addressing Warburg’s relationship with the anthropologists and ethnologists of his time following his American journey and locating them in the context of late nineteenth-century institutional expansionist policy in American territory that characterized the birth of modern anthropology and ethnology. The text also helps to understand, on one hand how institutions and museums of the Wilhelmine period of the German Empire promoted a liberal ethnology instituted by Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), and how these conditions in the Prussian capital allowed Warburg to encounter one of the periods’ most influential circles of Americanists (Eduard Seler, Karl von den Steinen, and Zelia Nuttall). On the other, it presents how modern American ethnology in the Unit ed States promoted by Franz Boas and his circle (Gladys Reichard), was key for Warburg to resume his Americanist interest in the later part of his life, upon his discharge from the Bellevue clinic in Kreuzlingen in 1924.

This approach is followed by two objectives that focus on specific aspects which were of interest to Warburg in his encounter with American anthropology and with topics relevant to ancient Middle American and South American cultures. In the first, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Voth and the Study of Native American Religious Ceremonies, Claudia Wedepohl’s point of departure is one of the highpoints of Warburg’s American journey: his expedition to the Black Mesa in Arizona, at what time its indigenous settlement was beginning to be explored by ethnologists from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Wedepohl analyzes Warburg’s relationship with Thomas Keam and Heinrich R. Voth, the former a merchant trader, the later a Mennonite missionary, and demonstrates their role as Warburg’s interpreters and mediators during his stay in Walpi and Oraibi. Furthermore, Wedepohl examines handwritten and visual material (Warburg’s diary and photographs) to reconstruct the moments that led Warburg to consider a joint project with Voth, a publication dealing with the material collected thru fieldwork, and based on his experience as witness to the Hemis Katsina dance, one of the fertility rituals in Oraibi. Ultimately the project remained unfinished once Warburg turned down a research post to pursue his academic habilitation at the University of Kiel in 1897 and gave up on the idea of becoming an ethnographer.

In the second text titled Quechmictoplican: mítico lugar de encuentro entre Aby Warburg y Mesoamérica, Linda Báez Rubí delves into a topic of significance to Warburg during his American trip: the ancient cultures of America. Through the study of handwritten notes preserved in the file “Americana”, Báez Rubí not only draws attention to the fact that there is still material to analyze on this topic, as she also raises a question highly unattended up to this moment: what were Warburg’s interests in pre-Columbian cultures? This question leads Báez Rubí to reconstruct a network of Americanists with whom Warburg was in contact with either through his readings or personally (Zelia Nuttall, Eduard Seler, and Hermann Strebel); and to address how Warburg saw contemporary studies corroborated his idea on the migration of symbols throughout the American continent, to the point that he considered extending his journey to ‘ancient Mexico’ at a time when the Mexican government’s institutions were beginning to regulate archaeology given the surge of privately sponsored archaeological expeditions in Mexican territory (William Niven, 1850-1937).

The outline of the historical context, topics, and people from the American trip is followed by theoretical approaches formulated by the American experience. Textiles and ornament are the point of departure of two proposals while the following two explore the notions of symbol and prophecy developed by Warburg in the 1920s. Isabella Woldt reflects on the dynamics of textile media in Warburg’s research from an iconological-anthropological stance. In her contribution, The Navajo-Weaver. Aby Warburg’s Approach to the Anthropology of Textiles, Woldt focuses on a series of photographs taken by Warburg during his stay in Black Mesa in April 1895 that catch Navajo women weaving on looms that serve to delve into the act of weaving and the symbolic meaning it held for Warburg. Understanding the act of spinning and weaving as a practical process that joins elements to produce surfaces that hold figurative and geometric forms given by collective cultural memory. It is possible to open a panorama that highlights the dynamics of the conformation of images (remembering, shaping, and reproducing). Therefore, in the broadest sense, the textile becomes a symbol for creative thought, a device that mobilizes both interior (cultural memory) and exterior images (composed on textiles, tapestries, and fabrics), transformed into a cultural artifact and antecedent to the concept Bilderfahrzeuge coined by Warburg in 1907.

In Warburg and “The Genesis of Ornamentation”: A (Pan-) American Question, Spyros Papapetros takes as point of analysis the study of ornament and the theoretical implications developed by Warburg during his visit with the people of the Americas in 1895 and 1896. His proposal, based on a careful reading of notes, sketches, and aphorisms that Warburg collected during the American journey, tracks the theoretical sources (Gottfried Semper). Hamburg scholar’s. This analysis provides insight as to from where he reflects on the ornamentation of the ceramic corporal adornment, and dance attire that he saw and witnessed; furthermore, it explains how Warburg took on the task of transforming Semper’s theoretical proposal on the formal principles governing the creation of body ornament based on universal cosmic laws, such as gravity and resistance, into psychological and epistemological dynamograms, which trace the oscillation, the progress, and the regressive phases found in every culture of the world. With his study Papapetros demonstrates how ornament becomes the most practical and manifest means to track the oscillatory movements of the spirit imprinted on the human body, which strives to synchronize the behavior of its corporal ornaments with the regulatory influence of cosmic bodies.

Giovanna Targia centers her analysis on the 1920s, a significative period when the American theme in Warburg once again became medullar to his theoretical reflections on the symbol once he entered in dialogue with the writings of philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874- 1945). Based on a careful reading of their epistolary exchange, and on the analysis of Warburg’s theoretical fragments concerning expression, her essay Symbolic Function and Physical Laws. Aby Warburg’s and Ernst Cassirer’s Reflections on Native American Culture, reveals Warburg’s reason to approach the material of his American journey over again with retrospective attentiveness. For this, Targia takes on the task of examining the concept symbolic forms in both scholars, critically contrasting them, focusing attention on the diverse forms of expression (language, art, religion, etc.) that either observed in the religious cosmology and totemic tradition of the Zuñi belief system. Targia discusses how each author’s notions of “symbol”, and “symbolic function” were shaped by conceptual models derived from the contemporary laws of physics, characterized by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. This framework allowed Warburg to consider the culture of American Indians to be a catalyst or a “concave mirror” (Auffangspiegel), as in its core it merged lines of research which at first glance seemed parallel or separate.

The essay Homo Divinans: Warburg on Prophecy by Davide Stimilli proposes a philological-hermeneutic examination of the potential the concept of prophecy holds in Warburg’s study of indigenous ritual celebrations, an interest which Warburg resumed the last ten years of his life. Davide Stimilli’s starting point is the provocative title Homo divinans by Americanist Theodor-Wilhelm Danzel, who understood it from an evolutionary perspective, in contrast to Warburg’s characterization of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt as two different prophets in the seminars he delivered at the University of Hamburg in 1927. Stimilli drives far-reaching investigation on the psychological and hermeneutical implications that “prophecy” had on Warburg’s research on the generation of knowledge; and delineates how the prophetic theme increasingly became an intense preoccupation, especially in concern with his failed project to return to the American Southwest in 1928. Stimilli’s proposal reveals how this failed project nevertheless, anticipates the Atlas of images Mnemosyne as provider of a critical-divinatory instrument of our time, by casting light “in prophetic key” onto the “dialectic of the image” built under the comprehension of its formulation as an enigma.

Last, with Aby Warburg y Konrad Theodor Preuss: rituales y serpientes, Johannes Neurath culminates the section on the historical reconstruction while discussing the figure of Konrad Theodor Preuss (1869-1938), an Americanist close to the Warburgian circle in the twenties. By comparing Warburg’s and Preuss’ thematic interests, Neurath highlights their shared interests centered on the presentation of the dramatic ritual acts enacted by the Indigenous groups settled in the American Southwest. Preuss’s participation in the series “Vorträge der Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg” evidences the intellectual context that interested the Hamburg circle surrounding Warburg during the 1920s: expecting to include and integrate research from diverse cultural spheres to carry out a comparative exercise that would address the psychic activity of the individual from diverse geographic regions, to thus open the panorama of the time’s history of art to a cultural reflection of greater scope, a project that would be interrupted by Warburg’s death in 1929.

Warburg’s passing marks the beginning of this book’s second part, which under the theme “Survivals” gathers texts committed to test ing Warburgian theoretical concepts in diverse temporalities of Ibero American culture, as well as in their close global relationships with the other cultures of the world. Focusing on the analysis of the migration of symbolic energy and the devices that generate this energy, in Hacia una historia simbólica de los elefantes José Emilio Burucúa and Nicolás Kwiatkowski journey through bestiaries, fables, myths and legends centered on the characteristics of elephants. Their proposal links Warburgian concepts such as “survival” as well as “migration” to cast a glance towards the genealogy and the circulation of texts and images between Asia, Europe, and America. They explore the migration of the symbolic energy through images, showing how experience and imagination combined to create the conditions for a double symbolic use of elephants. On one side, and closer to the pole of experience, they suggest that the pachyderms were portrayed as a synthesis of strength and military intelligence; while on the other side, imagination, fed by classical and Hindustani literature (which reached Europe through Greek, Byzantine, and Arabic mediation) associated elephants with intelligence, piety, chastity, and prudence. Additionally, the text introduces yet another compelling question: that the migration of images and the energetic charge they radiate is possible by means of the vehicles that transport it and by the use that the individual makes of them.

This is what the essay On Warburg’s Baroque and Two Seventeenth Century, Mexican Arcos Triunfales explains. Christopher Johnson holds that Warburg’s work on late Renaissance triumphal processions in Europe, and the study of their disposition in varied panels of the Atlas of images Mnemosyne (1926-1929) can offer a clue for reading, and understanding, even if anachronistically, the complicated constellation of words and images on the triumphal arches erected in 1681 Mexico City to commemorate the arrival of the viceroys Marquesses de la Laguna. Johnson proposes that the multimedia arches projected by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in her Neptuno alegórico, and by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora in his Teatro de virtudes políticas, created a “space of reflection” where the survival of the antiquity was presented as a phenomenological, cultural, and political challenge, as it remodeled classical mythology through pathos formulas, hieroglyphs, and emblems.

Delving into the political character of iconological discourse, Johnson reveals how the triumphal arches operated as identity-configurator vehicles of a society in search of both, continuity, and tradition, as well as change and renewal in its attempt to forge its own, distinctive identitarian lineage, yet connected to the origin of the Hispanic monarchy.

Another example of the bipolar tension of symbols as Warburgian mnemic dynamo-engrams can be explored in Laura Malosetti’s text Tabaré: migraciones y ambivalencias del héroe trágico. The author analyzes the kidnapping of a woman in its mythical origin, its continuation through diverse variants, as well as its persistence in narratives on the conquest of America, focusing on the region of Río de la Plata. Her study reveals how the survival of the notion of the “hero’s virility” as a symbol for the superiority of one human race over another, formulating itself as a symbolic attribute of Nations, nevertheless remained ambivalent, as reflected in the figure of the mestizo Tabaré, conceived in the lengthy poem written by Uruguayan author Juan Zorrilla de San Martín in 1886. Malosetti presents how the immediate reception of the poem received derived in several operatic and musical adaptations in Uruguay, Argentina, Spain, and Mexico during the first decades of the 20th century, prompting images that were reproduced by the thousands: first, illustrating from pamphlets to books, and later school notebooks, all of which prolonged the poem’s popularity in and outside Uruguay, as it became one of Mexican cinema’s earliest fiction feature films.

Following the approach of the last two texts, it is possible to examine representation as spectacle, and to address the problem of the expression and coining of iconic-visual composition where memory and imagination are in play in the experimental use of montage and projection techniques, as announced by Warburg’s Mnemosyne project in the 1920s. This is explicitly rendered by Philippe-Alain Michaud’s text Mnemosyne, ou la machine cinématographique sans appareil, where the author postulates the thesis that Warburg in his Mnemosyne experimented diverse ways to dynamize images, conceiving the panels of his Atlas as a cinematographic machine but without a cinematographic device. Michaud invites us to reflect on an underestimated yet crucial point in the genesis of the Atlas, Warburg’s American journey between 1895 and 1896 to the Hopi region in Arizona. According to Michaud, Warburg believed he saw in the ritual practice of indigenous people a phenomenon like that of the reappearance of antiquity in the Florentine Renaissance. This comparison allowed Warburg to elaborate in Michaud’s words a “theory of fiction” by employing montage and projection techniques. Derived from this, it is possible to think that the notion of “survival”, a key concept in Warburg’s theory for the symbolic configurations of representation, is conceived not only as a notion or as a form of knowledge, but as a spectacle: not as Vorstellung but as Darstellung. The text proposes how this change of paradigm, propelled by Warburg, turned art history studies, which now convey significant influence on the field of media, and intermediality studies. This area announced by Michaud is explored in the contributions that close this book’s second part.

The aspect of dynamic devices is clearly explored by Luis Pérez-Oramas in “Nachleben” en sus campos extendidos: Modernidad, cinetismo y humanismo: Pathosformel, forma intermediaria y sobrevivencia antitética. From a provocative standpoint testing the notion of “survival” or “posthumous life” in the extended field of modernity in America, Pérez-Oramas, following a proposal that poses an analogy between pagan antiquity and modernity, hypothesizes that what is understood as the “altered forms” of modernity in the American continent can be seen and interpreted as “modern survivals”. This postulation thus opens the horizon to a dual repertory of what the author designates as “posthumous emergence” which extends to the modern works of the antique, which seem to cancel it programmatically, as well as to the modern, itself in so much as it is possible to conceive it under a topologic alterity. The author tests the Warburgian notions of Pathosformel and “intermediary form” by reading the modern typology of Penetrable, an installation devised and fabricated by Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto as a performative space of gestures and a perceptive field of dematerialization where both forms of survival take place.

Otherwise, the practice of curatorial discourse subordinated to the museum as a media device makes manifest how the symbolic energy of images employed in an exhibition can modulate and model collective behavior. José Luis Barrios in A propósito de la exposición “Constitución mexicana, 1917-2017. Imágenes y voces”. Arqueología afectiva e imagen dialéctica: sobre la curaduría como crítica histórico-política del presente, outlines the reach of political imaginary by analyzing in Warburgian-Bejaminian terms, the construction of the exhibition ‘Constitución mexicana, 1917-2017. Imágenes y voces.’ Barrios proposes that this exhibition, presented at the National Palace in the framework of the Centenary of the Mexican Constitution, the result of a cultural imaginary of the law, can well be understood from Aby Warburg’s concept of Pathosformel and Walter Benjamin’s “dialectical image”. By means of them Barrios delves into the idea that a country’s constitution is not only a social contract agreed upon by individuals and collectivities; furthermore, he states that ontologically it is the expression and configuration of relations between forces, bodies, and ideas, which in their tension and contradiction define people’s mode of existence in a common space. Last, Barrios shows how the law prefigures imaginary representation orders which put in play tensions between the instituting affection and the instituted power, as well as a society’s past and present.

This text closes the second part to give beginning to the third and last titled Repercussions, with texts that carry out a retrospective critique of the material presented. These contributions not only present the convenient gaps yet to study, but also their importance to Warburg’s American journey, as Emilie Carreón Blaine demonstrates in Los estudios del arte indígena americano ante los postulados de Aby Warburg: un reconocimiento póstumo. Her reflection on the book’s first part results in an elucidating discussion that positions Warburg within the anthropological and ethnographic practice of his contemporaries, while it explains how in their “modernity” they repeat earlier practices, their anachronisms practiced to this day when engaging with Amerindian cultures. Furthermore, Carreón Blaine outlines the projection the Americanist studies by the “cultural psychohistorian”—as Warburg referred to himself—would have reached had he welcomed the Americanists to the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW) in 1930. She explores possible exchanges and fertile research that would have resulted in Americanist anthropology, ethnography, and archaeology carried out in Mexican territory at the time. In this exercise, she highlights the relevance and the value of the literature on pre-Columbian cultures that Warburg consulted to pursue his research interests while providing a historiographic overview of the Americanist studies developed after Warburg’s passing, to underscore the influence of Warburg’s disciples to this day.

On another vein, Elia Espinosa reflects on material presented in the second part of this book, to weave with poetic and analytical prowess “discourses in transit” in Imágenes y palabras en discusiones warburguianas; tránsitos antiguos y contemporáneos. Taking on Lezama Lima’s reflections in Esferaimagen, Espinosa explains how many of Warburg’s iconical-theoretical proposals have been parallelly developed in modern Latin American iconic-visual production, spanning from the generation of performative spaces for gesturality, to the configuration of political imaginaries in contemporary curatorial practices. Espinoza shows how parallels between Warburguian thought and the intellectual exercise of Latin American discourse outline concerns touching on human behavior shared by every geography and time: the desire to grasp phenomena encountered by means of a plastic language accounting for the energy inhabiting this iconical language, and on how it remodels itself at every time and in each geographical region never ceasing to allude to the echo of the voice that gave origin to it.

Finally, Didanwy Kent Trejo’s text Imágenes de la promesa/imágenes que prometen, takes the book’s two parts as the starting point to reveal the life of images in “their weave of subterranean roots”. By this means, it is possible to understand the generation of historical imaginaries forged on heroic American figures acquires its own dynamic in different media (poetry, opera, and cinema) that make them visible. Thus forwarding the proposal that the movements of transference—such as seen in Warburg’s personal cartography when he traveled to key places connecting continents, which is the image under which this meeting was held—, far from being understood as passive receptions, should be considered fruitful processes as they entail a critical stance: a dialectic encounter between who preserves and carries the object, and who receives and is capable of transforming it into something similar, yet different. In its growth, revealing the aperture of new projections, and if wanted, of promises, as Kent establishes as a manner of conclusion: “images promise in their future to be traces, sediments of our passage through earth; they are from their diverse modalities, the promise to preserve the cultures of the past, but also the future life of humanity”.

In this sense, and retaking the words of this book’s epigraph, it is not only about outlining a biography, it is about making fruitful a legacy that held a relevant psychic and physical place in Warburg: the presence of America with the cultures which have inhabited it from time immemorial to this day: “and if perhaps we young researches keep the hope of preserving the institute according to the guiding spirit under which he [Warburg] conceived it, it is because he taught us that our problems ultimately concern both worlds, the old and the new” [44].

Notes

[1] In anthropology of images, the main thesis stems from the recognition that the place where images are generated is the human body (Homo pictor), which addresses both imaginaries and cultural models of perception and production, as well as the vehicles and conditions of images’ visibility. In German scholarship, see pioneer studies by Hans Belting, Antropología de la imagen (Belting [2001] 2007), and research developed following his proposals in Bild und Körper im Mittelalter (Marek, Rimmele, Preisinger 2006); Topologien der Bilder (Hinterwaldner, Juwig, Klemm et al. 2008), and Techniken des Bildes (Schulz, Wyss 2010); Gottfried Boehm’s, Homo pictor (Boehm 2001); and other studies by Lambert Wiesing, like Artifizielle Präsenz. Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes (Wiesing 2005); Bilder – Sehen – Denken: Zum Verhältnis von begrifflich-philosophischen und empirisch-psychologischen Ansätzen in der bildwissenschaftlichen Forschung (Sachs-Hombach, Totzke 2011). An introductory study on Warburg’s academic biography is Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: Una biografía intelectual (Gombrich [1970] 1992); for a review of this biography, see Mazzucco 2011; other views on Warburg and his method coming from the “Warburgschool” are brought together in Wuttke 1992. On the Warburg school, see Cieri Via 1994.

[2] Published posthumously, first in English: Saxl [1930] [1957] 2023; and later in German: Aby Warburg’s Besuch in New-Mexiko, en Wuttke 1992, 317-326. The printed version was slightly edited, the epistolary context surrounding it suppressed and lost the dialogue with Theodor-Wilhelm Danzel, Americanist and pre-Columbian scholar rescued by Carreón in this volume. See correspondence between Fritz Saxl and Theodor-Wilhelm Danzel, September 4th, 1930, WIA GC.

[3] On the history of the library, see Stockhausen 1992.

[4] This book was preceded by the international symposium Aby Warburg on/ about America: Translations and Projection that took place in the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, between the 6th and 8th of September of 2017, with the support of several sponsors such as the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas-UNAM, the Art History Graduate Department, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras-UNAM, the Centro de Estudios Mexicanos, unam, in London, the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Conacyt), the Humboldt-Universität of Berlin, the Kunsthistorisches Institut of Florence, the Max Weber Stiftung, Paris, and the Warburg Haus, Hamburg. The contributions chosen and accepted for this volume were subsequently reviewed and worked on as articles in extenso, nourished by the reflections and discussions produced within the symposium’s framework. Thus, as the scope of each research expanded, also owing to the useful comments derived from the subsequent peer review of the volume, the need arose to work and order them differently under another structure. This stage of restructuring, deepening and research development was made possible thanks to the support of the project “Aby Warburg y los estudios precolombinos: reconstrucción histórica y desarrollo teórico” (PAPIIT-UNAM), without which this academic publication would not have reached a successful ending.

[5] It is also necessary to critically consider the influence of the early followers of Warburg’s legacy, whose studies directly draw from the library, thus reflecting the constellation of a device that not only ordered but also generated knowledge, and who exerted a considerable influence on Latin American art history scholarship: Ernst H. Gombrich (1909-2001), Edgar Wind (1900-1971), Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), Rudolf Wittkower (1901-1971), as well as contemporary scholars who have fixed on the works of the father of “image science” and whose studies have been translated to Spanish, to name only a few: Georges Didi-Huberman (1953), Hans Belting (1935- 2023), Horst Bredekamp (1947) and Gottfried Boehm (1942).

[6] The proposal for this dialogue was mentioned by Gerhard Wolf, in Wolf 1999. Although it was formulated before the end of the 20th century, a continuous construction was missing in Warburgian circles, except for the project “Globalisierung von Bildern und Dingen” (2001-2011) promoted by Wolf at the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz, and characterized by the inclusion of scholars coming from non-European geographical-cultural areas.

[7] The absence of researchers and lack of topics related to Latin America at the international conference in commemoration of his birth, “Aby Warburg 150. Work. Legacy. Promise” (London 2016), made evident a discussion about Warburg limited to European and American circuits, thus omitting his development in the Latin American sphere.

[8] Warnke, Hoffman 1980; Bredekamp 1991.

[9] Renewal; Burucúa et al. 1992; RPA.

[10] Meaning in the Visual Arts (Panofsky 1955). The critique of Panofsky by Georges Didi-Huberman’s study, Devant l’image. Questions posées aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Didi-Huberman 1990), also sparked interesting debate in Anglo-Saxon spheres, where visual studies have fought to open other research venues on how to study the phenomena of visual culture and the means that make them possible. In this regard, see paradigmatic examples W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Mitchell 1994), and Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Holly 1984).

[11] Michaud 1998; Didi-Huberman 2002.

[12] One of the books that catapulted Warburg’s revival in the Spanish-speaking world was José Emilio Burucúa, Historia, arte, cultura: de Aby Warburg a Carlo Ginzburg (Burucúa 2003). Laura Malosetti continued with this revaluation organizing seminars on the German scholar’s method; see, for example: http://www.artes.uchile.cl/noticias/55065/aby-warburg-y-el-devenir-del-metodo-iconologico#.

[13] See Hensel 2001; and the recent revision by Büchsel 2019, 67-106.

[14] Except for a few studies that highlight the aspect that his approach was modeled in dialogue with Americanists, as reflected in the approach of his last major project, the Atlas of Images Mnemosyne. See: Imbert, Bassiri, Allan 2006.

[15] Once the compilation of this book was completed, the “International Symposium Aby Warburg 2019” coordinated by Roberto Casazza, was held at the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno, Argentina, which made manifest Latin American scholarships’ interest and participation in Warburguian topics. Within the framework of this symposium, several exhibitions were organized, one of which is recorded in the catalogue Ninfas, serpientes, constelaciones: la teoría artística de Aby Warburg (Burucúa et al. 2019). Unfortunately, this material could not be included for evaluation in this book as it was already in the process of being edited; it is necessary to mention it because it constitutes a call from Latin American academy to reflect on Warburg’s legacy and it carries out the pending tasks formulated in this compilation.

[16] Letter from Aby Warburg to Fritz Saxl, April 16, 1923, WIA GC. Reproduced in Warburg [1923] 2004, 67-68.

[17] In addition, the important role Fritz Saxl played in the process of ordering and redacting ideas can be seen in McEwan 2007.

[18] As Fritz Saxl states in the Collected Works (Gesammelte Schriften) editorial plan (see the Preface to Renacimiento, 60). At first, Edgar Wind oversaw the editing of the English version of the Kreuzlingen conference, once it reached London, see “The Warburg Institute, Annual Report 1934-1935”, 8.

[19] On the conditions and negotiations of the library’s migration, as well as on the important role played by Edgar Wind in outlining the direction the library’s research and academic activities were meant to follow in London, see Buschendorf 1993, 90, 93-112, 115. Under item 3 of the “Activities of the Institute,” Wind specifies (105) that the publication of two bodies that reported on the type of research and topics that were of interest to the library would continue. “Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg and Studien der Bibliothek Warburg” would become “Journal of the Warburg Institute” (1937-1938) to later be the “Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute”; also see Fritz Saxl, Das Warburg Institute (Saxl [1944] 1993, 130-131).

[20] A Lecture on the Serpent Ritual, “Journal of the Warburg Institute” II/4 (1938-1939): 277-292. Based on a version of the Kreuzlingen conference corrected by Bing—it differs in various parts from the Kreuzlingen version—translated to English by John F. Mainland in 1938. See the materials in WIA III 93.3, “Aby Warburg. A lecture on Serpent Ritual.”

[21] Warburg [1923] 1984.

[22] Aby Warburg, Schlangenritual. Ein Reisebericht, edited by Ulrich Raulff, Warburg [1923] [1988] 2011. Raulff wrote a postface explaining the importance of the theme to contepmporary art history. For the materials for this edition, see: WIA 93.10 “Material used for the Wagenbach edition”.

[23] Naber 1988; Wiegel [1994] 1995; Settis 1993; Forster 1996; Severi 2003.

[24] See Ulrich Raulff ’s epilogue to Aby Warburg, El ritual de la serpiente (Warburg [1923] [1988] 2011, 71-114.

[25] Aby Warburg’s Kreuzlingen Lecture: A Reading (Warburg [1923] 1995, 59-110).

[26] Warburg [1923] 2003.

[27] Warburg [1923] 2004. Reviewed by Peter Krieger (Krieger 2006).

[28] Souvenirs d’un voyage en pays pueblo. Notes inédites pour la conférence de Kreuzlingen sur le rituel du serpent (1923) and On planned American visit, in Michaud 1998, 247-280, 281-285.

[29]  Ricordi di viaggio nella regione degli Indiani Pueblos nell’America del Nord (Frammenti, polverosi materiali per la psicologia della prativa artsitica primitiva) and A proposito del programmato viaggio in America (1927); plus, Warburg’s translation of a text by J.W. Fewkes, Le origine leggendarie del clan con il totem del serpente, in Ghelardi 2006, 3-85, 86-91, 92-98.

[30] Cestelli Guidi [2006] 2007. On reflections related to anthropological-ethnological themes of the time, see Severi 2004.

[31] While the correspondence does not revolve around specific ethnological issues, it does bring forth Warburg’s intention to make his “new method” known to American academia. See Stimilli 2005.

[32] Bender, Hensel, Schüttpelz 2007; Warburg’s translation of a text by J.W. Fewkes was included, Legendary Origins of the Clan with the Totem Serpent (1894), 17-22, and Die Indianer beschwören den Regen. Großes Fest bei den Pueblo-Indianern (1926), 59, attributed to Warburg and Fritz Saxl by Michael Diers who registers its publication in the journal “Jugend Insel. Zeitschrift für Jungen und Mädel” 1 Jahrgang (1926).

[33] See WEB, 508-523. This early conference announced under the title Eine Reise durch das Gebiet der Pueblo Indianer in Neu-Mexiko und Arizona (1897) was presented before the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Amateur Photographie in Hamburg, January 21, 1897 (the review appeared in the journal “Photographische Rundschau” 11 (1897), 38); then before the Amerikanistenclub in Hamburg on February 10 and finally on March 16 before the Freie Photographische Vereinigung at the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin (the review appeared in “Photographische Rundschau” 11 (1897), 61). See material held in WIA III 46 “Pueblo Indians, 1897”.

[34] Bilder aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo-Indianer in Nord-Amerika (1923) and Reise-Erinnerungen aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo Indianer in Nordamerika (1923), respectively in WEB, 524-566 y 567-600.

[35] Cestelli Guidi, Mann 1998.

[36] GS Pueblo.

[37] While this book was going through its editorial process, the exhibition of the pieces Warburg donated to the Ethnological Museum of Hamburg (March 4, 2022, to January 8, 2023) took place, and the resulting catalogue Ligthning Symbol and Snake Dance, Aby Warburg and Pueblo Art (Chávez, Fleckner 2022).

[38] The stance held by Ernst Gombrich (Gombrich 1970, 216-227), and Forster 1996, has been revitalized in favor of greater recognition of the significance that Warburg’s ethnological incursion had on his later reflexive approaches. See David Freedberg 2005; moreover Bender, Hensel, Schüttpelz 2007.

[39] Freedberg 2004; Farago 2002, XX; Schüttpelz 2005.

[40] While there is a difference between early anthropology and ethnology in both countries that will not be discussed for reasons of space, what characterizes them both is their approach to “primitive” cultures or “Naturvölker” from a stance from which they are seen as objects—and not subjects—of a remote past in danger of extinction, thus concealing their history while omitting the social dynamic within and among themselves—and with it, interethnic and cultural differentiation—also in tension with the civilizing power of the explorers, ethnologists, colonizers, and collectors who research them. For a contemporary reflection on these aspects in general, see Clifford 1997 y Phillips, Steiner 1990. For the North American case straddled between the 19th and 20th centuries, see Hinsley Jr. 1981; and different essays in Stocking 1985; for the German case, see Zimmerman 2001; and Stocking Jr. 1996.

[41] A key point was the monograph coordinated by Cora Bender which brought together anthropologists and art historians who reflected on the theme of the snake in Warburg not only regarding Kreuzlingen, but also concerning the cultural anthropological historical context that prevailed in the late nineteenth century (Bender, Hensel, Schüttpelz 2007).

[42] WIA III 12.7.1. “Americana Notes”, 26. II. 1928, fol. [2r].

[43] See a description of the overland route linking Mexico and the United States, towards the end of the nineteenth century. El Ferrocarril Central Mexicano, the Mexican Central Railroad’s various branches reaching the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe railway in Seler 1889.

[44] Saxl [1930] [1957] 2023, 317.

Bibliography
Abbreviations
Bibliographical References
Abstract

This contribution presents the volume Aby Warburg en/sobre América: Historia, sobrevivencias y repercusiones, and publishes the editors’ introduction to the volume. Issued by the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, the book gathers the outcomes of the international symposium Warburg (en/sobre) América: translaciones y proyecciones (MUAC, September 2017), organized with the support of several academic institutions in Mexico and Europe. Structured in three sections—Historia, Supervivencias and Repercusiones – the collection highlights the decisive role of Aby Warburg’s 1896 journey to the American Southwest in shaping his intellectual formation, and underscores the significance of American anthropology as a key to understanding his later theoretical work.

keywords | Aby Warburg; Serpent Ritual; Hopi; Jesse Walter Fewkes; Smithsonian Institute; Franz Boas; Heinrich Voth.

Per citare questo articolo / To cite this article: L. Báez Rubí, E. Carreón Blain, T.V. Álvarez, A Presentation of: Aby Warburg en/sobre América: Historia, sobrevivencias y repercusiones (México 2024), “La Rivista di Engramma” 227 (settembre 2025).