Anthropologies of Art (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts) [n ed.] 0300103530, 9780300103533

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction: The Objects of Art History and Anthropology
Art History — Anthropology — Visual Anthropology
Objects of Art History and Anthropology
Disciplinary Histories
The Productivity of Difference
PART ONE ENTWINEMENT AND DIVERGENCE
Warburg’s Mask: A Study in Idolatry
On the Margins of Recorded History: Anthropology and Primitivism
Toward an Anthropology of the Image
Linger or Flee? Pieter Aertsen,“lguegha Uhe,” Michel Leiris
Transcending Places: A Hybrid, Multiplex Approach to Visual Culture

PART TWO LOCAL PRACTICE, TRANSCULTURAL THEORY
The Functions of Chinese Painting:Toward a Unified Field Theory
Seeing Indigenous Australian Art
The Knowledge of Women
But Is It Art? The Complex Roles of Images in Moche Culture, an Ancient Andean Society of the Peruvian North Coast
Anthropologies and Histories of Art: A View from the Terrain of Native North American Art History

PART THREE ART AS ANTHROPOLOGY
Reconfiguring the Ground: Art and the Visualization of Anthropology
History Now: Post-Tribal Art
The Value of Disciplinary Difference: Reflections on Art History and Anthropology at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century
Contributors

Citation preview

ANTHROPOLOGIES

OF ART

Edited by Mariët Westermann

ANTHROPOLOGIES

OF ART I /Al\ I

ANTHROPOLOGIES

Edited by Marîët Westermann

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Williamstown, Massachusetts

Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London

This publication is based on the proceedings of the Clark Conference

“Anthropologies of Art,” held 25-26 April 2003 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. For information on programs and

publications at the Clark, visit www.clarkart.edu.

© 2005 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street, Williamstown, MA 01267 Curtis R. Scott, Director of Publications David Edge, Graphic Design and Production Manager Diane Gottardi, Layout Mary Christian, Copy Editor

r

Printed by the Studley Press, Dalton, Massachusetts Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London

ISBN (Clark) 0-931102-55-3 ISBN (Yale) 0-300-10353-0 Printed and bound in the United States of America 10 987654321

Title page and divider page illustration: Francis Frith, detail of The Rameseum of El-Kurneh, Thebes, First View, from A Series of Twenty Photographic Views, c. i860. Albumen silver print from glass negative. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clark Conference (2003 : Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute) Anthropologies of art / edited by Mariet Westermann. p. cm. — (Clark studies in the visual arts) “Based on the proceedings of the Clark conference “Anthropologies of art”, held 25-26 April 2003 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts”----T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-931102-55-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Art and anthropology—Congresses. I. Westermann, Mariet. II. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. III. Title. IV. Series. N72.A56C57 2003 7O4.O3--- dc22 2OO4O4542I

Contents

Introduction: The Objects of Art History and Anthropology

vii

Manet Westermann

Part One : Entwinement and Divergence Warburg’s Mask: A Study in Idolatry

3

David Freedberg

4 On the Margins of Recorded History: Anthropology and Primitivism

26

Francesco Pellizzi

Toward an Anthropology of the Image

41

Hans Belting

Linger or Flee? Pieter Aertsen,“lguegha Uhe,” Michel Leiris

59

Ikem Stanley Okoye

Transcending Places: A Hybrid, Multiplex Approach to Visual Culture

89

Suzanne Preston Blier

Part Two : Local Practice,Transcultural Theory The Functions of Chinese Painting:Toward a Unified Field Theory

111

Jonathan Hay

Seeing Indigenous Australian Art

124

Howard Morphy

The Knowledge of Women

143

Sarah Brett-Smith

But Is It Art? The Complex Roles of Images in Moche Culture,

an Ancient Andean Society of the Peruvian North Coast Steve Bourget

164

Anthropologies and Histories of Art:

178

A View from the Terrain of Native North American Art History Janet Catherine Berio

Part Thr ee: Art as Anthropology Reconfiguring the Ground: Art and the Visualization of Anthropology

195

Anna Grimshaw

History Now: Post-Tribal Art

221

Shelly Errington

The Value of Disciplinary Difference: Reflections on Art History and

242

Anthropology at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century Ruth B. Phillips

Contributors

'

260

Introduction: The Objects of Art History and Anthropology

Mariët Westermann

The Clark Conference “Anthropologies of Art,” held in April 2003, brought together

art historians and anthropologists who have investigated intersections and diver­

gences of their disciplines, either through their particular historical or cultural studies or through their methodological inquiries. A striking theme of the gathering, both

inside and outside the auditorium, was the occasions rarity. Although art history and

anthropology have looked over each others shoulders throughout their histories, and never more so than in this inter- and cross-disciplinary moment, they have seldom engaged in a sustained exchange about their disciplinary motivations, protocols, and

boundaries.1 As an edited record of the conference, this book hopes to open up new channels of communication at a time when each discipline is looking to the other for culturally specific ways of speaking about art and for the possibility of understanding

art as a cross-cultural and trans-historical human activity. This essay introduces the questions that framed the conference for anthro­ pologists and art historians of quite different stripes, and it outlines some of the en-

twinements, divergences, and complementarities of art history and anthropology.

The papers gathered here did some or all of the above in more specific terms. Taken apart and together, they instantiate how anthropologists and art historians can sharpen their focus and raise their ambitions in conversation with each other.

Art History—Anthropology—Visual Anthropology It should be noted at the outset that art history and anthropology have been seeking out the other for quite different methodological needs. The self-aware art history of the

past two decades has looked both backward and outward to discern its disciplinary objectives. Many places it has looked—in art history’s nineteenth-century origins, in the cultural history and new historicism so formative of social art history, in the phenomenology embraced to avert the Scylla of arid formalism and Charybdis of

contextual determinism, in the postcolonial exposure of structural Eurocentrism in the humanities—it has found anthropology and ethnography.2 Art history’s anthropolog­ ical flirtations have been seen to mirror those of contemporary art and art criticism.3

Pervasive as art history’s anthropological turn seems to be, it has had a provisional,

intuitive quality, particularly for historians of Western, Islamic, and Asian art.

viii

MariëtWestermann

The fieldwork and theoretical frameworks traditionally employed in the

study of African, pre-Columbian, Native American, and Oceanic art are often aligned with anthropology’s ethnographic practices. Many art historians and an­

thropologists working in those fields have thought hard about their disciplinary po­ sitions, and they were thus well represented in the conference. Howard Morphy’s

phenomenological confrontation with Yolngu art, Sarah Brett-Smith’s analysis of

Bamana mudcloth patterns as registers of female modes of knowledge, and Steve Bourget’s archaeological reconstruction of the role of images in ancient Moche cul­

ture could qualify equally as art history or anthropology, depending on one’s disci­

plinary perspective. If asked, Morphy would self-identify as anthropologist,

Brett-Smith as art historian, Bourget as anthropologist-archaeologist-art historian. By training and by range of area interests—from Maya hieroglyphs and Plains In­

dian drawings to the gendered history of textiles and the historiography of non­

Western subdisciplines—the art historian Janet Berio has- found herself inevitably committed to the practices of art history as well as anthropology, experiencing both

as “inventive, experimental, and open to interdisciplinarity.” Jonathan Hay’s ambi­ tious attempt to bracket off a millennium and a half of pre-modern Chinese paint­

ing from adjacent forms of cultural production, on the basis of function, owes as much to the rigors of structural anthropology and sociological communication the­

ory as it does to postmodern art history.4 For all historians of art engaged in some measure with anthropology, the

discipline’s sophisticated understanding of social processes, cultic rituals, exchange mechanisms, and mythic self-narration has held out a promise of structural under­

standing of how images (and not necessarily works of art) are encoded to mean something to their makers or consumers. Not surprisingly, the cultural anthropol­ ogy that understands art as semiotic system has been particularly attractive to art

historians trained in decoding complex iconographies and pictorial narratives.5 If art history has been provisional about the anthropology in its craft, an­

thropology has long studied and debated art and its role in culture, almost always understood as the culture of non-Western, pre-industrial, pre-bureaucratic states.6

Pleading in this book for art historians and anthropologists “lingering or hanging

out in the oddly populated corridors” between our disciplinary houses, Ikem Stanley Okoye observes “that only a small number of those cultural anthropolo­ gists interested in art or representation ever turned their attention to the art of

Western Europe and North America, perhaps in an eerie display of reverence.” Anthropologists (and occasionally art historians) certainly have widened their

Introduction

ix

purview beyond presumably “authentic primitive art” to transformations in the forms and functions of traditional non-Western arts in response to heightened in­ digenous participation in a global market for art and tourist souvenirs.7 Shelly

Errington’s contribution sketches the history of Western engagement with “primi­ tive art” from high modernism to its contemporary incarnations. Arguing strongly for the continued possibility of local distinction, she indicates how global technological transformation can be just as threatening, stimulating, or

empowering to Fourth World artists as it may be to their Western counterparts.

Even though anthropological studies of art have flourished in the post­ colonial era, art has never been central to anthropology in a theoretical sense.

When anthropologists have trained their eyes on objects made by skilled artisans

for non-utilitarian, or not exclusively utilitarian purposes, they have tended to

study them for their social and mythic roles in making and shoring up a society’s deep conceptual structure, and thus for their ability to confirm insight into a so­

ciety that may also be procured by examining other cultural products such as kin­ ship systems, exchange mechanisms, or cultic rituals.8 Even Claude Levi-Strauss’s

compelling diagnosis of contrasting formal and iconographie features of masks

produced by the coastal peoples of the Pacific Northwest seeks to identify social conditions and relations underlying the aspect of the masks, irrespective of their

power or efficacy as art objects.9 Aware of anthropology’s tendency to see art as referring elsewhere—as always being allegorical—anthropologists have begun to call for a phenomenologi­

cal and historical approach that takes works of art as formative rather than merely reproductive of social conditions and cultural understandings. Howard Morphy has put the challenge to anthropologists quite generally: “for art to be analysed to

greatest advantage it is necessary to focus on its material aspect and to reconnect the anthropologist’s interest in meaning with the art historian’s concern with form.”10 Drawing more specifically on anthropology’s long-established concern

with the social construction of power and communication mechanisms, Alfred

Gell has asked that anthropologists account for the objecthood of works of art by analyzing them as “persons”; that is, as social agents in a system of production and circulation.11 Although Gell explicitly disavowed the possibility of applying art his­ tory’s unspoken aesthetic and institutional assumptions to non-Western products

of art, he acknowledged, as many anthropologists have, that art history can offer

insight to anthropologists insofar as it takes works of art as objectified ways of see­ ing, manifested differently in different cultures and historical moments.12

x

MariëtWestermann

Partly as a result of this renewed interest in the possibilities of an anthro­

pology of art, visual anthropology has now established itself as a prominent spe­ cialty within the discipline. A young held, visual anthropology concerns itself equally with the critical analysis of visual methods of anthropological documenta­

tion and with visual productions of the cultures under study. Its initial focus in the 1970s on him and television as documentary methods has been relinquished for the broader study of visual systems of knowledge in the culture studied by the

anthropologist.13 Under such a dehnition, Brett-Smith’s art historical study of Bamana mudcloth patterns in this volume could easily qualify as visual anthropol­ ogy. When engaged with a culture’s visual aesthetics as a mode of seeing or

making the world, visual anthropology indeed frequently trains its eye on the vi­ sual arts and their reception. Visual anthropology’s relationship to art history is

not unlike that of visual studies, in that its theoretical concerns range well beyond

the art object. Yet as in visual studies, visual anthropology’s preferred laboratory is that of (post)modern art in all its medial complexity.14 Art history has been gen­

erally unaware of visual anthropology’s arrival, but anthropologists of art have found potential allies in the new subdiscipline, on occasion arguing that the an­ thropologies of art and of aesthetics as we know them should be subsumed into a broader visual anthropology.15

Against this historical backdrop of shared interest in questions of the aes­

thetic power, mythic efficacy, and social function of art objects and in the cultural relativity of visuality, the conference speakers were asked to keep in mind or ad­

dress several questions. How do anthropology and art history define “art”? Is it

possible to find a cross-cultural definition of art, or of aesthetics, and what ends would such a definition serve? What sorts of questions do these disciplines ask of

the object, whether thought of as “object” or as “work of art”? Can an anthropol­ ogy of Western art be effected from within the institutional and methodological

structures of Western art history? What implications do the answers to these

questions have for the collecting and display of Western and non-Western objects

in museums of art and ethnography? And, in hopes that the conference might fo­ cus centrally on the different disciplinary understandings of objects, the organiz­

ers asked participants to privilege case studies of specific objects, genres, or media. In return, I promised to start the conference with a few general remarks on the

objects of art history and anthropology.

Introduction

xi

Objects of Art History and Anthropology Each of the nouns and compound nouns in “The Objects of Art History and Anthropology” is so radically unstable as to make an attempt at classification or description sheer folly. My preliminary thoughts on the matter were offered not

as definition but as opening circumscription, meant to invite and provoke

dialectical engagement. The two days of intense conferencing certainly did not

produce a consensual understanding of “objects,” “art history,” “art,” “history,” or “anthropology,” and as I began to write up my introduction I regretted having

put the definitive article before “objects.” And then I started wondering if I should not have used the plural “anthropologies,” on which I had insisted for the conference title, and extended it to “art histories.” But then why should “art” be

singular, and should the conference itself not have been named “Anthropologies of Arts,” unlovely though the term?

Of all the terms in my subtitle, “objects” may be the most complex and

contested of all, and so I will start with those, hoping that art history and anthro­

pology will slide into provisional places around or between them. Many of the us­ ages of the word “object” in the human sciences are implied here, intentionally so, for they were central to the interests that motivated the conference. Objects are

things, of many kinds. In the primary sense in which they appeared in the confer­ ence, they are material things made or found by humans that have the potential to

be put into social circulation, again of many kinds. As such—and here we have one unsatisfactorily circular definition of objects—they are things that are central to the investigative practices of art historians and anthropologists of art. In art his­

tory these objects are often held to be synonymous—too easily—with works of art. It may perhaps be said that objects become interesting to art historians when

they become works of art, that is, when they can be perceived to do some kind of cultural work for or with or to a viewer, who may be the maker and/or viewer

and/or consumer of the object. That work is typically done within what we may term an art world or sphere of art, whatever shape that world or sphere may take

in different historical or cultural situations.16 “Things made or found” because nat­

ural objects or non-art objects can also function within a sphere of art if brought into it by an artist, a patron, a collector and so forth: shells and urinals will come

to mind most immediately.

In cultural anthropology, the object that participates in a sphere of art is

more usually referred to as “art object” rather than “work of art.” “Art” in anthro­ pology is often taken in the original Western sense of the Latin ars, making by

xii

MarietWestermann

(prized) skill. As such, anthropology’s art object is stripped of the evaluative, nor­ mative connotation it gained in Western aesthetics since the Renaissance and es­

pecially in German Idealist philosophy, even though the anthropologists most interested in art allow, and indeed postulate, that the efficacy of an art object in

any society is not exhausted by its utilitarian purpose, and that its power belongs to the realm of the aesthetic. For most anthropologists, and for many historians

of pre-Enlightenment art, aisthesos is not limited to a disinterested, Kantian, theo­ retically universal appreciation of beauty warranted by deeply ingrained Western standards, but encompasses culturally specific systems of visual properties that so­

licit sensate responses in viewers competent to have them.17 Art historians and anthropologists appear to agree more or less that an

artifact—that is, any thing made by humans—can but need not be a work of art or art object. I am not certain that the distinction between “work of art” and “ob­

ject” is motivated by anything other than disciplinary habit: as far as I can tell, anthropologists of art and art historians use their terms of choice for what we

may jointly call art objects. These I am now, at my peril, going to circumscribe provisionally as objects made or found by humans, that have the potential to be

put into social circulation and that demand by their visual aspect, not exclusively but at least in part, an aesthetic response to work efficaciously within their cul­ ture. Such a response induced by sensuous perception would, at least for those ex­

periencing it, make the art object transcend its immediate utilitarian function. This definition is probably leaky at best and ethnocentric at worst. Its

specification of a visual aspect may be its most Eurocentric component: not being seen can be central to the aesthetic power of a cult object.18 It is obviously a post­

Renaissance definition, conditioned by the advent of aesthetics as a philosophical enterprise and by art history’s foundational, inextricable investment in its tenets.19

Although the circumscription may at first evoke Erwin Panofsky’s famous defini­

tion of the work of art in “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” I in­ tend the “in their culture” to move the art object out of the realm of the

disinterested judgment of beauty postulated by Kant and endorsed by Panofsky.20 Culturally conditioned recognition of “beauty” is only one of numerous possible aesthetic responses to visual stimulation: fear, awe, repulsion, fascination, discom­ fort, anger, arousal can be others, and all are dependent on a viewer’s cultural and

biological apparatus.21 This is not to say that viewers may not have aesthetic responses to art objects originating outside their culture—the entire history

of anthropology as well as “primitivism” in modern art gives the lie to such a

Introduction

xiii

proposition—but rather that those responses are conditioned by the aesthetic sys­

tem specific to the outsider’s cultural apparatus. By including the found object as possible art object, my circumscription leaves aside, as anthropologies of art and aesthetics often do, ars or skilled making

as a necessary condition of art, however frequently it may be a significant attribute of the art object. I do so here in an attempt to allow for the “artness” of art and to encompass that surplus of the art object that is not accounted for when we have

done the work of explaining its social origins and destination, its material structure and symbolism, its cultic function and critical reception, and so on. That surplus is

as hard to talk about as it is impossible not to, as Clifford Geertz reminds us, and it is probably the central aspect of the object that makes it “art.”22 By insisting on the

solicitation of aesthetic response as the crucial property of an art object, my defini­

tion also means to invite contestation, and to incite speculation about the possibil­

ity of aesthetics as an analytic category that might be applicable across cultures.23 At least three participants in the “Anthropologies of Art” conference strongly suggested that the one cross-cultural, trans-historical, indeed anthropological constant

of the art object may be its substitutional function: its necessary replacement of an ab­ sence by an image and/or object. That image and/or object is a mechanism for coping

with the abjection attendant on the loss of the absent object—implicitly, a person

and particularly the person’s living body and face. In assuming this function, some measure of loss continues to cling to the art object. It is no coincidence, Pellizzi argues, that “art,” language, and funerary practices appear to have devel­

oped more or less synchronously, as products and promoters of human con­ sciousness, after “tools” had already existed for hundreds of thousands years. The

dead body attended to by survivors (perhaps having already born decoration in

life) then becomes a first work of art, though the mask, Belting and Freedberg ar­ gue, is equally paradigmatic of the art work in its substitutional status and the

confrontation it stages with absence and loss of identity. For Pellizzi, Belting, and Freedberg, the mask demands aesthetic experience of an uncanny rather than a

beautiful kind—as, Freedberg argues, it did for Aby Warburg. The reception of

Freedberg’s The Power of Images indicates that many art historians may not find such an originary definition of the art object productive for their historical con­

cerns, but that anthropologists continue to be sympathetic to a quest for univer­ sal constants in human artistic production. There are other ways, however, in which we may take the objects of art

history and anthropology. Art objects are the things that museums collect, pre­

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MarietWestermann

serve, and display, interpreting them in the execution of each of those mandates. Art objects are found in all manner of museums: museums of art and archaeol­ ogy, art galleries, museums of anthropology or ethnography (or in the older term,

“of man”), and most curiously, museums of natural, as opposed to cultural, his­ tory Museums of anthropology and natural history tend to collect only non­

Western and especially pre-industrial “primitive” art objects, but those types of objects can be found in profusion in art museums as well. (I would argue that the

distinction between “primitive” and pre-modern Western art objects in museum culture is not fundamental: no art objects made before the nineteenth century

were made to be put in a public museum of the modern kind. Western and non­ Western art objects received their differential status in the course of museum his­

tory.) The same classes of objects may thus appear in any of these types of museums. How a museum object is experienced depends greatly on its institu­

tional setting: as a timeless work in the great enterprise of human art or a work of

specific efficacy in a particular culture, or—and I assume this must be a thing of

the past—as a window into the human mind and society at a more primitive stage of their development. The different ways in which museums interpret their objects are in many ways determined by the academic disciplines that shaped

them, that is, art history and anthropology. Several of the conference’s speakers have investigated this problematic extensively in the past, and Ruth Phillips ad­

dresses it briefly in her contribution; for now it leads me into a third sense in

which we may take the objects of art history and anthropology. In the idiom of the modern human sciences, objects are also the matters

that disciplines worry over, as in “the object of study,” a term closely related to

“the purpose” or “the goal” or “the objective” of research or study. One cluster of questions for the conference concerned objects in this sense, asking how the disci­ plinary boundaries between art history and anthropology might be drawn, and to what extent they might be permeable or elastic. Those boundaries have much to do with the questions anthropology and art history ask of art objects, or rather with how anthropologists and art historians put art objects to work for them. I will return to this topic below.

“Objects” may be even more central to the language of psychoanalysis than they are to anthropologies and histories of art. Almost regardless of what school of psychoanalysis one might advocate or tolerate, the object is the other

that our restless subjectivity seeks after, to be or to possess or to be possessed by,

with endlessly deferred success.24 For the purposes of the conference, we could

Introduction

xv

set aside whether the psychoanalytic search after the object is a universally hu­ man, a quintessentially Western, or an exclusively modern condition. But if we

accept just for the moment some fundamentals of twentieth-century psycho­ analytic theory, we might postulate that human desire to look at and project its

imaginary objects—a desire motivated in the identification processes of the un­ conscious—may well inform the visual structure as well as the aesthetic experi­ ence of certain art objects.25 If and how this might work theoretically and in specific historical instances is a controversial topic in psychoanalysis, let alone art history, and I suspect it may be more so in anthropology. Yet the fascination of

objects for art historians as well as anthropologists of art is in great part the allure of the exotic other, remote in time and/or place, never recoverable in the pleni­ tude of some presumed authentic meaning, never quite looked at face to face. I

rather doubt that the anthropological practice of fieldwork with live witnesses within the originary, producing context of the objects—a practice shared by

many historians of non-Western and of contemporary art—ultimately yields more direct access to the other than art historical research into the works of artists

and cultural moments long past. As anthropologists have long acknowledged, the observer’s study of the other always amounts to self-analysis in part.

Disciplinary Histories At early moments in their histories, anthropology and art history shared funda­ mental interests in art objects as physical manifestations of the evolution of hu­

man consciousness. If anything unifies the diverse researches of Alois Riegl, a curator of decorative arts in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, it is his deduction of stages in the development of universal human subjectivity from the stylistic evidence of classical Mediterranean figural art, of ancient ornamental

forms, and of the seventeenth-century group portrait in Holland.26 The concerns with stylistic evolution of contemporary anthropologists such as A. C. Haddon

and Frank Cushing were rather similar in kind; the main distinction between art history and the anthropology of art in this period may already have been one of European versus non-Western or “primitive” art.27

Early in the twentieth century, when teleological evolutionism came un­

der attack in both disciplines, as it did in linguistics, historians of art and anthro­ pologists tried to set their fields on a more scientific, that is empirical, footing.

For the anthropology of art, this entailed an ethnographic turn that still struc­ tures much of the field, privileging the assembly of detailed evidence by sustained

xvi

Mariet Westermann

fieldwork in one particular social setting. Franz Boas structured some of his most

compelling arguments against lineal evolution of human civilization on his

knowledge of stylistic variety and change in art objects, including many he had

studied firsthand among peoples of the Arctic and the Northwest coast of Amer­

ica.28 In art history, empiricism meant heightened emphasis on archival studies, technical examination of objects, systematic iconography and the like. The “field­ work revolution” in anthropology had an asymmetrical equivalent in institutions

such as the Warburg Institute; Erwin Panofsky, in a sense, was art history’s Boas.

But even as art historians and anthropologists relinquished evolutionist models of form, the excavation of fundamental structures of the human mind, its intellectual and imaginative capacities, and emotional and social needs remained an ambition for both fields. In anthropology it became a central enterprise fo­

cused on myth, not objects; in art history it became the preserve of practitioners working at the margins of the field, closer to Geistesgeschichte and indeed, to an­

thropology. In anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss worked tirelessly and influen­

tially to establish the ontological equivalence of thought processes at work in “primitive” myth and modern science; in Kunstwissenschaft, Aby Warburg, a his­ torian of classical imagery and its transformations in Easter as well as later cul­

tures, once turned to Pueblo Indian rituals to argue the cross-cultural efficacy, perhaps even universality, of stages in serpent symbolism. As Freedberg’s essay ar­ gues, Warburg’s tragically blind turning to a live cultural other to lay bare the ir­

rational sources of European art would not meet the methodological gold standard of most anthropologists then or now. And yet his attempt reminds us of

the shared universalist aspirations of art history and anthropology in their early histories, and specifically of art history’s foundationally conflicted relationship to aisthesos as a legitimate mode of experiencing art’s power—a mode to be entered

and repressed in equal measure.29

For much of the twentieth century, art studies were marginalized within anthropology and confined by and large to ethnographic mappings in the tradi­

tion of Boas. Attempts at devising an anthropology of aesthetics, objects, or im­ ages were rare, perhaps even suspect. In the same period, art history also largely

abandoned attempts at grand unified theories of art or aesthetics, its practitioners preferring the explanation of the specific and the local in its objects and seeking interpretive verification through a diversifying array of technologies, from con­ noisseurship and material analysis to stylistic genealogy, iconography, and social

history. Anthropology and art history found each other primarily, but often war­

Introduction

xvii

ily, on the field of non-Western art history, and especially non-Western art history outside Asian and Islamic culture. The complex circumstances that shaped the marked disciplinary divergences of art history and anthropology must not have

been at all predictable or inevitable around 1900. In the wake of National Social­

ism, the totalizing ambitions of any trans-historical theory of the human mind

and the progress of civilization became suspect. Post-colonial realities also

prompted concerns about the imposition of Western structures of knowledge, in­ cluding aesthetic standards, on the anthropologist’s “raw” material. And in anthro­

pology, too, the tremendous prestige of Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology of myth, an analytic tool of mathematical elegance, and one rarely extended to ob­ jects, perhaps overdetermined the mainstream direction of cultural anthropology

away from art. In art history, Panofsky’s iconography assumed a similar domi­ nance, prized for its ability to unlock a symbolic world structuring some of the

most revered works of art in the Western tradition.

The Productivity of Difference As I have .indicated above, anthropologies of art and aesthetics have more recently

become active fields with discernible outlines, and historians of Western and non­

Western art alike have begun to draw on the theoretical and narrative resources of (post)structural anthropology. These developments may have been facilitated by

the loss to anthropology and to modern art of the “primitive” object of founda­ tional fascination to both, as Francesco Pellizzi argues in this volume. Pellizzi,

Errington, and Berio all note the recent resurgence of anthropology’s interest in

art objects. A few sites of scholarly production are specifically dedicated to pro­ moting cross-disciplinary engagement, including other conferences such as this one and, most notably, Res, the journal of anthropology and aesthetics founded

by Pellizzi, which has become a significant venue for some of the most innovative art historical and anthropological writing.30 And yet, art historians and anthropol­ ogists of art often seem strikingly unaware of developments and positions in each

other’s disciplines, even as they may quote and cite a few canonical texts across the boundary between them. Most relevantly to the conference, practitioners in

both disciplines rarely ask each other how they deal with art objects today. Again by way of setting up a foil, I will outline some generalizing answers. In teaching, I tend to produce a rough, highly asymmetrical Venn diagram, with

“Anthropology” in the left-hand circle, “Art History” in the right-hand circle, and

“Objects” in the area of overlap, somewhere off-center. We then jot down terms

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Mariët Westermann

denoting the questions the disciplines ask of the objects, and how they go about

phrasing some answers. The picture becomes very messy very soon, with many ar­ rows looping through the circles to indicate feedback from one term to another.

What I try to postulate in those seminars can be summarized as follows.

Anthropology is the study of humans in their social aspect. It is about the making, sustaining, replication, and representation of social order in the widest pos­

sible sense. Although anthropology’s origins are as quintessentially Western as those

of art history, the discipline has traditionally taken non-Western and especially “primitive” societies for its raw material; those “primitive” societies are best defined

as pre-industrial, without advanced bureaucratic structures, and often without a

written cultural production. Anthropology attempts to get at social structure and its symbolic reproduction by analysis of a wide array of cultural products: religion, magic, kinship systems, gift exchange mechanisms, legal structures, games, humor,

rituals that enact, reproduce, or represent all of the above, and yes, village layouts, ■?

buildings, and objects, art- or otherwise. Objects, including those that make up the built environment, rarely constitute the primary object of study for anthropologists;

objects more typically are one medium through which the anthropologist seeks ac­ cess to the mechanisms of social order and its representation. To cultural anthropol­

ogists, objects may be one of many cultural products through which societies talk

about themselves, find meaning in their worlds. (I am speaking now of cultural an­ thropology at large, rather than at the wide range of object-centered researches that can be ranged under anthropology of art and aesthetics.)

The class then engages in a sidebar discussion of the differences, or lack

thereof, between anthropology and ethnography. Etymologically the distinction seems clear: anthropology is the science of anthropos, (universal) man, ethnogra­

phy the (fieldwork-based) description of an ethnos, a people (society). And yet there are strong historical linkages between the two practices. In the evolutionist moment, ethnographic study of “primitive cultures” was thought to give access to

earlier stages of the development of human societies and cultures in general.

While Lévi-Strauss patently rejected this naïve model, his ethnographic analysis of the structural relations of mythic components in the “savage mind” was ulti­ mately meant to reveal fundamental tendencies of opposition and transformation

in human thought and culture.31 Parsing a range of ethnographic descriptions, James Clifford has shown that even the least ambitious ethnographic study as­

sumes a basic understanding of universal biological experiences such as childbirth or death, and thus comments allegorically on such unstated universals.32 Visual

Introduction

xix

anthropology has been explicit about the generalizing aspirations of its densely descriptive practices, seeing its goal, in the words of two prominent practitioners,

as “an understanding of the place of the visual in human culture,” “the explo­ ration of the visual in the process of cultural and social reproduction,” and “the

study of the properties of visual systems; of how things are seen and how what is seen is understood.”33 Having worked through the relationship between ethnography and an­ thropology, the class then turns to art history’s relationship to objects. Art history

takes an interest in many and probably all of the categories of analysis mentioned for anthropology, along with perhaps more prominent variables such as the histor­ ically situated class, gender, and political commitments of makers and viewers. But

these factors engage the art historian insofar as they help situate the art object, or class of art objects, or makers/viewers of art objects. To most art historians, the art

object and its extensions back to the maker and outward to the patron, customer, or viewer, constitute the primary object of study. How an object (usually though

not necessarily of ars, skilled labor) came to look the way it did, and how its visual and material presence solicit an aesthetic response, or made or make it perform a

certain type of work for or on the beholder, is what art historians tend to ask of it.

These are not the only questions art historians put to art, for many of us write

about other aspects of the art world than objects or classes of objects, and many of us write more broadly about visual aesthetics in a certain culture. But they are cen­ tral questions, and they are ones art historians ask of art objects.

Perhaps I can exemplify these disciplinary differences and alignments with the art object that first got me reading in cultural anthropology, a large painting of a birth celebration by Jan Steen, made in the prosperous Dutch city of Haarlem in

1664 (fig. 1). In some ways the painting is one specimen in that long series of prod­ ucts of realist virtuosity, extending from the feats of Zeuxis and Parrhasios, as

recorded by Pliny, to our current modes of virtual reality. Its mimetic tactics are prodigious and, by the standards of their period, eminently successful, from the placement of the scene before you in a manner that turns you into an impartial ob­ server, to the reality effects of the props strewn anecdotally all over the place, to the

well-differentiated effects of light absorption and reflection off various metals and

ceramics (figs. 2, 3). If we take on faith the paintings veristic claims for itself, we would have to conclude that Steen represented a real birth celebration he might

have attended, or at least that the painting represents a birth celebration as it might have occurred in 1664. Steen upped this claim by inserting his face in the very back

xx

Mariet Westermann

Fig. I.Jan Steen (Dutch, 1626-1679), Celebrating the Birth, 1664.Oil on canvas, 34 5A x 42'A in. (88 x 107cm). The Wallace Collection, London

of the painting, as he did often—but

then and there the viewer encounters interference with the realist pretense. For here the painter, just as he makes his exit, is seen to make the gesture of

horning, or of the ass, or of both, di­

rectly above the head of the baby, im­

plying surely not the baby itself, but rather the presumed father who is holding it up for all the women to see. Up to this point, art history’s means Fig. 2. Detail of fig. I

served me well, but now I started to

wonder about the father, who, a bit of

Introduction

xxi

costume history quickly established,

wears rather rustic and old-fashioned

clothes, in striking contrast to the prosperous and fashionably appointed

middle-class interior. Was he the clas­

sic cuckold, the dolt who gets stuck

paying for the transgressions of his

wily wife, about whom seventeenth­ century farces and joke books could not stop jesting? Once I had drawn Fig. 3. Detail of fig. I

that provisional conclusion, the whole

scene started to look odder and odder, with this gaggle of women of all generations, chatting, eating, drinking by the childbed. What was feminine sociality like in the seventeenth century, and how did

the painting talk about it? To get a handle on the social assumptions that structure the painting, I

found my research techniques moving from those of art history to social history to material culture to structural anthropology and back again. Digging through chap­

books and popular prints and childbirth manuals from the sixteenth century, the conventional, old-fashioned character of the motif of the cackle of women at the

childbed became readily apparent (fig. 4). Here they were, gathered at childbirth, one of the most liminal of human experiences, sharing their privileged feminine secrets and jokes at the expense of impotent men. Anthropology was also useful in

getting at the role of Steen, the trickster, and his pairing, via the child, to his vic­

timized counterpart; it helped me see the generic cues in the painting that signal its wish to be taken comically; it let me think through the nature of the repre­

sented event as a comic ritual that might, in the end, shore up an ideal social order

in which real fathers pay for their children and in which real men, not gaggles of women, rule the roost. It also attuned me to the formal transformations structur­

ing the picture, helping me understand Steens persistent penchant for surface compositions that favor the diagonal, the diamond, the spokes radiating out from an unstable hub, over the orderly grids of a Vermeer, those geometric compositions

keyed faultlessly to one-point perspectival space. Steen’s disorder turned out to be a clever and sustained riff on the rationality of space and composition ciphered by Renaissance perspective. The broken eggshells, so confusing to iconographers who worried over their multiple interpretability as signs for fertility as well as impotence,

xxii

MariëtWestermann

made more sense once I had read Lévi-Strauss on the semiotic

reversibility and transformations of mythic figures and objects.

Anthropology’s insights

made it easier for me to see that Steen’s birth celebration would not have taken place, like this, in

the home of the type of urban patron who could and did buy expensive paintings of this kind. There, the birth celebration was

a ritual of the most controlled politesse, more like the one rep­ Fig. 4. French, unknown artist, The Cackle of Women at Childbed, 16th century.

Woodcut

resented in a contemporaneous

painting by Gabriel Metsu, in which a lady comes to pay respects to the new mother and the indisputable father of the child, in a geometricized space learned from contemporaries such as Pieter de

Hooch (fig. 5). The ancillary female figures stay backstage, tending to the cradle and pulling up a chair for the guest. I might have intuited the relationship between these two paintings with standard iconographie techniques—after all, social art his­

tory was well established, and I was reading lots of comic literature—but I think anthropology attuned me to the joint incompatibility and complementarity of

these two figurations of the social. It helped me understand that two painters could create nearly opposite systems of disorder and order within a dominant visual

regime of mimesis, and that in doing so they addressed issues of central concern to their society.

Like other historians of early modern art, I had come to structural an­ thropology by way of the relatively new discipline of historical anthropology. That

subfield of cultural history rather than anthropology may be described as an effort

to apply the descriptive techniques and semiotic insights of structural anthropol­ ogy to the everyday and the overlooked in Western social history, as opposed to

the history of great men and great events.34 I found that structural anthropology and its semiotic modifications had produced compelling instances of rich descrip­ tion and forceful analysis of formal contrasts in art objects and visual aesthetics.35 My small example may suggest the occasional fertility of approaching cultural pro-

Introduction

xxiii

Fig. 5. Gabriel Metsu (Dutch, 1629-1667), The Visit to the Nursery, 1661. Oil on canvas, 30 'A x 32 in. (77.5 x 81.3 cm).The Metro­

politan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.20)

ductions as different as seventeenth-century Dutch painting and Native American

myth for parallels rather than differences of semiotic structure or social situation.

In this volume, Ikem Stanley Okoye and Suzanne Preston Blier argue more folly that the structural study of the making, circulation, and reception across time of African art may clarify analogous processes in Western as well as other non-Western

art production and reception. Nevertheless, my case study cannot folly encompass the objects of art his­

tory and anthropology in any sense. The very focus on art objects may raise objec­ tions from architectural historians (although I think of buildings as special classes

xxiv

Mariet Westermann

of objects). It may be challenged more strongly by historians of images (although I think of objects as carriers, projectors, and producers of images). Hans Belting’s re­

cent book Bild-Anthropologie, and his contribution to this volume, take persuasive issue with the category “art,” and ask for a reconceptualization of the history of

objects as an anthropology of images.36 Belting’s Bild can be taken to mean “im­

age,” but in the specific sense of something close to “(human) likeness.”37 A focus on art objects may be most questionable, however, to anthropol­

ogists of aesthetics. Jeremy Coote has insisted on a broader understanding of aes­ thetics, which would recognize the variety of aesthetic experiences detached from

the art object and would study a culture’s ways of seeing, a term that excavates the early twentieth-century project of Heinrich Wolfllin and draws for its more re­

cent models on the work of Ernst Gombrich and Michael Baxandall. Coote’s ar­ guments are strongly supported by his study of the cattle-keeping Nilotes of the southern Sudan. Although these peoples have virtually rib tradition of making art objects, their elaborate visual aesthetic based on the shapes and colors of their cat­ tle permeates every aspect of visual experience in their societies.38 Like the anthro­ pology of aesthetics, visual anthropology seeks a more encompassing model for

studying visual experience, artistic and otherwise, at home and abroad, as Anna

Grimshaw’s paper demonstrates—and yet it may be postulated that it will find it virtually impossible to do so without the “embodied images” of Belting’s Bild­

Anthropologie, that is, without (art) objects.

“Anthropologies of Art” did not seek to legislate new disciplinary bound­ aries or to police old ones. At the outset of the conference, it seemed to me that anthropology and art history were most closely allied in the structural analysis of

densely described data sets that uncover a culture’s “forms of seeing.” As Gell and other anthropologists have argued, art history’s practice of bringing historical

context to bear on the conventions of art, in part to explain the visual knowledge of a historical period, is analogous to art anthropology’s efforts to elucidate the

ways of seeing of a cultural system^ But two days of conferencing complicated

these matters as much as they clarified them, all the while wresting new insights from confusion. The object of “Anthropologies of Art,” then, is what and how we might learn from the other in the current moment of our disciplines. The unexpected character of the results is already registered in the organi­

zation of this book, which reorders the flow of the conference. In Part One of the book, David Freedberg, Francesco Pellizzi, Hans Belting, Ikem Stanley Okoye, and

Suzanne Preston Blier plot historical entwinements and divergences of art history

Introduction

xxv

and anthropology, as well as new approximations and alliances in the field of visual culture. In Part Two, Jonathan Hay, Howard Morphy, Sarah Brett-Smith, and Steve Bourget test transcultural theory on case studies of Chinese, Australian, African, and Peruvian art, respectively. Here historians and anthropologists of art

appear most closely aligned in possessing knowledge of local cultures so intimate as to help us see, know, understand, and feel through the eyes of distant others.

Janet Berio closes Part Two by tracing the historiographic trajectory of Native American art history from locally compartmentalized studies of “authentic” tribal

cultures to more dynamic models of circulation of objects, practices, and people in regional, continental, and global contexts of exchange. In Part Three, Anna

Grimshaw and Shelly Errington, both anthropologists by training, demonstrate how art itself, at home and abroad, works not just as anthropological documenta­

tion but as anthropological investigation. In direct collaboration with artists in her native England, Grimshaw turns her anthropological eye on contemporary art.

True to her discipline, she seeks to elucidate art’s originating culture rather than

the specific character of the art. - The book’s last words, for now, come from Ruth Phillips, who responds

directly to each of the conference papers. As historian of African art turned an­

thropologist of Native North American visual culture, she is well poised to argue

the case for productive difference among the disciplines. Each of the texts in this volume in some way argues for and demonstrates Blier’s point that the hybridic,

“multiplex” approach to art objects that has been most productive for African art might well be suited to any art productions past and present. In doing so these

papers answer Pellizzi’s plea, issued early in the conference, for not an “anthropol­ ogy of art” but an “art of anthropology’ that would both encompass and tran­

scend the exactness of science and [modernist] creativity’s ‘ruthless’ plundering’” of the primitive.

i. Two recent conferences addressing anthropology and art (with less of an emphasis on art history

than the 2003 Clark Conference) include “Anthropologie, objets et esthethiques,” held at the Cen­

tre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris, November 2002, and “Fieldworks: Dialogues be­ tween Art and Anthropology,” held at the Tate Modern, September 2003. 2. The literature is extensive and the following are mere examples of art history’s recent pursuit of

anthropological terms: David Freedberg, The Power of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago

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MariëtWestermann

Press, 1989); Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologic: Entwürfe fur cine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001); Hugo van der Velden, The Donor’s Image: Gérard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of

Charles the Bold, trans. Beverley Jackson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); Irene J. Winter, “The Body of

the Able Ruler: Toward an Understanding of the Statues of Gudea,” in Dumu-E-dub-ba-a: Studies in Honor of A. W Sjoberg, ed. H. Behrens et al., 573-83 (Philadelphia: The University Museum,

1989); Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Prince­

ton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Reindert Falkenburg, “Iconologie en historische antropolo­ gie: Een toenadering,” in Gezichtspunten: Een inleiding in the methoden van de kunstgeschiedenis, ed. Marlite Halbertsma and Kitty Zijlmans, 139-74 (Nijmegen: Sun, 1993). In anthropologically in­

clined cultural history, works of art function more often as stories about a people than as conven­ tional historical illustrations. See Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of r Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987), and Herman Roodenburg, “‘The Hand of Friendship’: Shaking Hands and Other Gestures in the Dutch Republic,” in A Cultural History

of Gesture from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, 152-89

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 3. Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant Garde at the End ofthe Century, 171-204 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

4. Hay’s essay shows an affinity with the functionalist-semantic approach of Rosalind Krauss,

“Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 2.76—90 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986). Krauss has frequently appealed to the ex­

planatory force of Levi-Strauss’s method of reading complex, richly anecdotal myths for their trans­ formations of a culture’s most profound structural concepts.

5. The now classic theoretical statement on the cultural anthropology of art, read widely outside an­ thropology and non-Western art history, is Clifford Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” Modern

Language Notes 91 (1976): 1473—99. The success of Geertz’s essay is in part due to its striking range of examples outside the traditional purview of anthropology, from Abelam paints and Moroccan

speech acts to Matisse and Italian Quattrocento painting (as glossed by Michael Baxandall, Painting

and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style [Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1972]).

6. Dedicated anthropological studies of principles of non-Western art, with much consideration of

the applicability of Western aesthetic theory to non-Western art, of the possibility of cross-cultural definitions of art and aesthetics, and of the validity of classifications of non-Western, pre-industrial

art as “primitive” or “exotic,” include Franz Boas, Primitive Art (New York, 1927); A. A. Gerbrands,

Art as an Element of Culture: Especially in Negro Africa (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1957); Carol F. Jopling, ed., Art and Aesthetics in Primitive Societies: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1971); J. A. W. Forge, Primitive Art and Society (London: Doubleday Press, 1973); Richard L. Anderson, Art in

Introduction

xxvii

Primitive Societies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1979); and Robert Layton, The Anthropol­

ogy ofArt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Close ethnographic readings of the visual arts in specific cultures have generally found wider acceptance; for some outstanding examples, see Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago: Uni­

versity of Chicago Press, 1991); Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,

2002). For excellent historical surveys of anthropology’s engagement with art and the field’s compet­ ing definitions of art and aesthetics, see George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, The Traffic in Cul­

ture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Howard

Morphy, “The Anthropology of Art,” in Companion Encyclopedia ofAnthropology, ed. Tim Ingold, 648—85 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, “Introduc­

tion,” in Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, 1—11 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); and Raymond Firth, “Art and Anthropology,” in ibid., 15-39.

7. For example, Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1989); Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: Native Art and the Souvenir in Northeastern North Amer­ ica, 1700—1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); and Ruth B. Phillips and Christo­

pher B. Steiner, Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in the Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

8. See Morphy, “Anthropology of Art,” 656—62, on anthropology’s relative neglect of art in the

twentieth century as an aspect of its general disinterest in material culture, and on anthropology’s predominantly functional approach to art. Firth, “Art and Anthropology,” traces anthropology’s his­ torical concern with the social, ritual, and economic basis and functions of art in non-Western art

to its earliest history. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1998), 1-11, has argued that current anthropological theories of art are not anthropo­ logical theories but rather attempts to transfer a Western philosophy of art grounded in

eighteenth-century aesthetics and Western art institutions to “primitive” societies to which such theory does not apply. 9. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Way ofthe Masks, trans. S. Modelski (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983). 10. Morphy, “Anthropology of Art,” 662; Morphy’s essay goes on to argue that rigorous attention to

the way formal attributes, affinities, and contrasts work in a specific culture not only helps the out­ sider see and feel what it might be like to be a member of that culture, but that in aggregate such an anthropology of art manages “to pose questions about the Western category of art and to expose its

contextualized nature.” Gell makes a sharper distinction between the philosophy and sociology of art made and circulated in “advanced bureaucratic/industrial states” (such as Western Europe, China,

and Japan) and an anthropology of art geared to understanding art’s social role in societies lacking

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MarietWestermann

the modern economic conditions and art institutions that characterize the “advanced” states. ii.

Gell, Art and Agency, esp. 4-11, 96-154.

12. The only art historian consistently cited by anthropologists is Michael Baxandall, and

specifically his notion of a “period eye” developed in his Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Cen­

tury Italy and The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, see Gell, Art and Agency, 2; Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System”; Morphy, “Anthropology of Art”; Coote and Shelton, Anthropology, Art,

and Aesthetics. Quite justly, Baxandall’s standing in anthropology appears analogously secure to that of Clifford Geertz among historians of art and comparative literature. The notion that art

objectifies a culture’s modes of visual perception owes much to Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A

Study in the Psychology ofPictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, i960), and is much more controversial in art history than it is in anthropological studies of art. r 13. For an expansive view of the subdiscipline and its data sets, see the essays gathered in Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy, eds., Rethinking Visual Anthropology (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1997); their introduction (1-35) lays out the history and “duality of focus” of visual anthropology with particular clarity. 14. On the relationship of visual studies, here taken to be the study of visual culture, to art history,

see Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, eds., Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (Williamstown,

Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2003); for the predominant interest of visual stud­ ies in the modern and postmodern, and in art, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., Visual Culture Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), and Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Current descriptions of visual anthropology may some­ times be substituted wholesale for definitions of visual studies; two prominent visual anthropolo­

gists, for example, note that “one of the objectives of visual anthropology must be to reveal different

ways of seeing within and between societies and to show how they influence action in the world and people’s concepualisations of the world” (Banks and Morphy, Rethinking Visual Anthropology,

22—23). Of course the concern with “ways of seeing” evokes a strand of art history as well, promoted first by Heinrich Wolfflin and taken up, in rather more historical terms, by Michael Baxandall.

15. See especially the essays gathered by Banks and Morphy, Rethinking Visual Anthropology.

16. See Morphy, “Anthropology of Art,” 652-54, and Gell, Art and Agency, passim, for vigorous ob­ jection to application outside the industrialized world of Arthur Danto’s definition of art as pro­

duced and functioning within an institutionally recognized art world (Arthur C. Danto, “Artworks and Real Things,” Theoria 34 [1973]: 1—17).

17. Morphy, “Anthropology of Art”; Jeremy Coote, “‘Marvels of Everyday Vision’: The Anthropol­

ogy of Aesthetics and the Cattle-Keeping Nilotes,” in Coote and Shelton, Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, 245-73; Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” but compare Gell, Art and Agency, 3-4, for

the argument that “even if all cultures have an aesthetic, descriptive accounts of other cultures’ aes­

Introduction

xxix

thetics would not add up to an anthropological theory” on the grounds that, according to Gell, aes­ thetic schemes are always evaluative and thus “only of anthropological interest insofar as they play a

part within social processes of interaction, through which they are generated and sustained.” Gell’s emphasis on social agency and interaction as the stuff of anthropology is not denied, however, by

proponents of comparative aesthetics (see Banks and Morphy, Rethinking Visual Anthropology, esp. 1-4, 21-24). 18. See, for example, Mary H. Nooter et al., Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals, exh. cat.,

Museum for African Art, New York (Munich: Prestel, 1993), and Susan Vogel, Baule: African Art,

Western Eyes, exh. cat., Museum for African Art, New York (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1997), for efficacious invisibility in African art, or Cynthea Bogel, “Canonizing Kannon: The Ninth-Century Esoteric Buddhist Altar at Kanshinji,” Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 30—64, for strongly re­

stricted access to the normally hidden honzon or primary icon in the esoteric Buddhist temple Kan­

shinji. In the traditional Catholic cult, exposure of images to vision was and is carefully controlled.

The denial of visibility emphasizes the power of visuality in any given culture, and thus can be said to be a visual aspect of an art object or class of art objects.

19. The literature on art history’s unarticulated assumptions is extensive; for art history’s historical

entwinement with Kantian aesthetics, see especially Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann

and the Origins ofArt History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). 20. Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” (1940), reprinted in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 1-25.

21. For a sophisticated discussion of the definitional problem of art in anthropology, with proper recognition of the ethnocentric dangers of maintaining any category of “art” at all, see Morphy “An­

thropology of Art,” 648—56. Morphy’s working definition of art objects is culturally relativist, but

includes the requirements that they “encode meaning, or represent something, or create a particular meaning” and that “they are analysed for their aesthetic effect or their expressive qualities” (ibid., 655). Morphy’s understanding of “aesthetics” is similarly broad (674-77).

22. Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” 1473-74, in full recognition “that the definition of art in any

society is never wholly intra-aesthetic, and indeed but rarely more than marginally so.” See also James Weiner, ed., “Too Many Meanings”: A Critique of the Anthropology ofAesthetics, special issue of Social Analysis 38 (1995), for essays maintaining the position that aesthetics and art are fully interde­

pendent concepts in any society, and that they should be studied as “the form-producing regime in

any society, and its mode of revelation, respectively.” Weiner argues against a Western anthropologi­ cal mode of reading art and aesthetics for their (redundant) reproduction and maintenance of social order, which he sees as the dominant mode of art anthropology. 23. This has been a topic of productive discussion in anthropology (see n. 6 above), and occasionally

in art history; see David Freedberg, The Power ofImages: Studies in the History and Theory of Response

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Mariët Westermann

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Suzanne Preston Blier, The Anatomy ofArchitec­

ture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1987). But see Gell, Art and Agency, 5-6, for a much narrower, Western understanding of aesthetic response and hence rejection of a definition of art objects that insists on

their aesthetic properties: “The innumerable shades of social/emotional responses to artifacts in the unfolding patterns of social life cannot be encompassed or reduced to aesthetic feelings; not with­

out making the aesthetic response so generalized as to be altogether meaningless. The effect of aestheticization of response-theory is simply to equate the reactions of the ethnographic Other, as far

as possible, to our own. In fact, responses to artifacts are never such as to single out, among the spectrum of available artifacts, those that are attended to aesthetically’ and those that are not.” 24. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Ecrits: A Selection,

trans. Alan Sheridan, 1-7 (New York: Norton, 1977); idem, “Of the Gaze as objet petit a (ist French publication 1964), trans. Alan Sheridan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed.

Jacques-Alain Miller, 67-119 (New York: Norton, 1978); Juliet Mitchell, ed. The Selected Melanie Klein (London: Hogarth Press, 1986). 25. Lacan, “Of the Gaze,” 79-119; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975),

reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989), and other es­ says in this anthology of Mulvey’s work. 26. Alois Riegl, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin: G. Siemens,

1893); “The Place of the Vapheio Cups in the History of Art” (ist German publication 1900), trans. Tawney Becker in Christopher S. Wood, The Vienna School Reader, 105-29 (New York: Zone

Books, 2000); Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, 2 vols. (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdrückerei, 1901, 1923); and Das holländische Gruppenporträt, ist publ. as article 1902 (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdrückerei, 1931). 27. A. C. Haddon, Evolution in Art (London: Walter Scott, 1895); Frank Hamilton Cushing, Zuni

Fetiches (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883); Cushing, A Study ofPueblo Pottery

as Illustrative of Zuni Culture Growth (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1886);

Cushing, Outlines ofZuni Creation Myths (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893); Cushing, My Adventures in Zuni (Santa Fe: The Peripatetic Press, 1941). 28. Boas, Primitive Art.

27. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal·, Whitney Davis, “Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art

History,” Journal of Homosexuality 27 (1994): 141—59. 30. See n. 1 above.

31. Exemplified most brilliantly, perhaps, in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans.

John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). 32. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing

Introduction

xxxi

Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 98-121. 33. Morphy and Banks, Rethinking Visual Anthropology, 4, 17.

34. Roodenburg, “‘The Hand of Friendship’”; Falkenburg, “Iconologie en historische antropologie.” It can be difficult to discern the difference between historical anthropology and the cultural history

of writers such as Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Darnton, Steven Ozment, con­ cerned as they are with rather similar datasets and questions. 35. Raymond Firth, Art and Life in New Guinea (London and New York: The Studio, 1936); Coote,

“‘Marvels of Everyday Vision”; Levi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks·, Morphy, Ancestral Connections. Art historical work influenced by these approaches includes Winter, “The Body of the Able Ruler,”

and Van der Velden, The Donors Image, and the extensive writings of Robert Farris Thompson, starting with his Ph.D. thesis “Yoruba Dance Sculpture: Its Critics and Contexts” (Yale, 1965) and including an impressive range of exhibition catalogues of African art.

36. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. yj. As argued by Christopher Wood, review of Bild-Anthropologie, by Hans Belting, Art Bulletin 86 (2004): 371-74, esp. 373. 38. Jeremy. Coote, “‘Marvels of Everyday Vision,’” in Coote and Shelton Anthropology, Art, and Aes­

thetics, 245-73: “written out of a conviction that progress in the anthropology of aesthetics has been hampered by an undue concentration on art and art objects.” “Marvels of everyday vision” is Ernst

Gombrich’s well-known phrase from Art and Illusion. 39. Gell, Art and Agency, 2. The distinction between “historical period” and “cultural system” seems

false, unless one thinks of “cultural systems” as ahistorical constants, a common charge against structural anthropology.

PART ONE

ENTWINEMENT AND DIVERGENCE

Warburg’s Mask: A Study in Idolatry David Freedberg

Art historians have long studied Aby Warburg’s 1923 lecture about his visit to the Pueblos of northern New Mexico between December 1895 and May 1896.1 Indeed,

it has become rather too much studied, not only by historians of art, but also by

other intellectual historians, especially in the last decade.2 Much of the literature on it is repetitious; almost all of it is uncritical. It has been idolatrized as a pio­ neering example of the crossover between art history and anthropology. But

anthropologists know it much less well, if at all. At least some of the lecture’s con­ temporary intellectual cachet lies in the high irony of its central psychodrama.

Warburg delivered it in order to prove to his doctors that he was of sound enough

mind to be released from Ludwig Binswanger’s sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, and it shows him wrestling with his own inner demons as he seeks to account for the de­ monic yet salvific status of the snake in Hopi culture. It was the final, belated summation of the continuities he had always sought (but had long suppressed)3

between the culture of the Pueblo peoples and that of the Italian Renaissance.

“Das ist ein altes Buch zu blättern/Athen-Oraibi alles Vettern” (It is an old story: Athens-Oraibi, all kin) was the motto he placed at the beginning of the

mansucript of his lecture, overtly alluding to the lines from Faust, Part II: “Das ist

ein altes Buch zu blättern/Von Harz bis Hellas alles Vettern.” Warburg had used

the couplet three years earlier in his essay “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther,”4 but at that point it was German primitiveness which

he set alongside classical culture. Now, from the mists of his memory, he reclaimed native America, where a supposedly primitive culture, relatively untouched by civi­

lization (but disappearing fast), provided him with evidence of the wildness at the core of civilization. Warburg’s focus was on the meaning of the snake in both cul­ tures and on the ways in which he believed outward movement expressed inner

emotion in the figures of the dance.

Although the central example of Warburg’s lecture was the Hopi snake dance, few commentators on this piece have noted or attached any significance to

the fact that he never actually saw it. The closest he came was the Hemis kachina dance, which he saw at Oraibi on May 1, 1896.5 Warburg’s lecture offers a lesson

in some of the dangers that lie at the intersection of art history and anthropol-

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David Freedberg

ogy—as well as an inspiration. It requires a reading that is less hagiographical and

more cautious than usual. Indeed, it sounds a bell of warning to all those who would seek to draw out the lessons of allegedly primitive cultures (however well preserved they may seem to be) for modern culture—or even for its roots.

Warburg, of course, schizoid from the beginning, needed support for his

sense of the demonic that lies at the roots of the classical, for the irrational at the

base of the rational—and yet he never came to terms with his quest. It was all too

unsettling; and so, in all his thinking, he kept the demonic and irrational at bay by clinging to his belief in the cultural and epistemological authority of the logi­

cal and the rational. But at least it was a clinging, not simply an assertion, as so

often in the hands of his Anglo-Saxon epigones; at least he acknowledged the storm and darkness of the irrational in his failed navigation toward the light of reason. In this paper I shall have much to say that is critical about Warburg’s now over­

rated and much misunderstood journey to the Southwest in 1895-96. In the end,

his retrospective analysis of it was reactionary, not progressive. But it was indeed courageous, as he teetered on the brink of acknowledging the logic of unreason, the failures of science, and the truth at the heart of the demonic. And where is the modern anthropologist or art historian who has yet given the dances of the Pueblos

their due? There has been little progress since the days of Warburg and of Fewkes. Kachina dolls have become collectibles, but the secrets of the kachinas of the dance

remain. What, we must still ask ourselves, does it really mean to put on a mask or to collect a name? Names, like masks, seem mere substitutes for what really lies be­

neath them; but of course they are not. The issue is whether the ethnographer has

the skill to understand the full freight of both names and masks—whether as im­ ages or as their own, much more fraught, reality.

In an earlier article on this subject, I dealt with three main themes: (1) the

consequences of Warburg’s failure to notice the intense social struggle being played out at Oraibi at the very time of his visit there in 1895, (2) his desperation to find

a kind of originary and universal primitive culture in which to embed some of his favorite themes and obsessions, and (3) his rejection of his own Judaism in favor

of finding Arcadia elsewhere.6 Here, at the intersection of art history and anthro­ pology, I want to examine some of the insults of photography, the perils of museology,

and the freight of laughter. When Warburg went to the land of the Hopi to observe their ceremonies and to look for parallels between a surviving primitive culture (as he felt Pueblo Indian

culture to be) and the wild roots of classical culture in the West, there was already

Warburg’s Mask

5

one white man there who had access to those ceremonies, and who could act as guide and intermediary. This is how one young Hopi remembered that intermediary: The land was very dry the crops suffered, and even the Snake Dance

failed to bring much rain. We tried to discover the reason for our plight, and remembered the Rev. Voth, who had stolen so many of our cere­

monial secrets and had even carried off sacred images and altars to equip a museum and become a rich man. When he had worked here in my boyhood, the Hopi were afraid of him and dared not lay their

hands on him or any other missionary, lest they be jailed by the Whites. During the ceremonies this wicked man would force his way into the

kiva and write down everything that he saw. He wore shoes with solid heels, and when the Hopi tried to put him out of the kiva he would kick them. He came back to Oraibi on a visit and took down many

more names.7

Don C. Talayesva’s bitter denunciations of the Reverend H. C. Voth, Mennonite missionary to the Hopi between 1893 and 1902,8 have barely been re­ called in the literature on Warburg s lecture; yet it was he who accompanied Warburg

on his trip to Oraibi and Walpi in 1896, and who acted as his guide to the Hopi ceremonies. In fact, they even contemplated writing a book together on the sub­

ject, until Warburg himself came to realize the prickliness of the man.9 Talayesva’s resentment of Voth’s intrusion into the Hopi ceremonies and secrets and his ex­ ploitation of the knowledge (and objects) he gathered, whether for knowledge or

for material profit, was typical enough at the time.10 It reaches a high pitch in this passage. In it, Talayesva makes very clear his awareness that robbery compounds

the sin of idolatry. Indeed, he concludes his diatribe against Voth with a trenchantly ironic application of the ancient and universal terms of idolatry—embodied in the Judeo-Christian interdiction against it—to a museum: Now I was grown, educated in the Whites’ school, and had no fear of

this man. When I heard that he was in my mother’s house I went over

and told him to get out. I said, “you break the commandments of your own God. He has ordered you never to steal nor to have any other

gods before him. He has told you to avoid all graven images; but you have stolen ours and set them up in your museum.This makes you a

6

David Freedberg

thief and an idolater who can never go to heaven.” I knew the Hopi Cloud People despised this man, and even though he was now old and wore a long beard, I had a strong desire to seize him by the collar and

kick him off the mesa.11

Vo th is a thief and an idolator who sets up the Hopi objects he acquired in a museum,12 the very locus, as Talayesva seems to have been perfectly aware, for

the generation of new forms of secular adoration. But implicit in this shift from originary context to exhibition is a further tension, an inevitable one: either the museum has to resort to ethnography, which drains images of their sacrality by

substituting labeling for experience, or it is predicated on the excitation (whether spontaneous or artificial) of aesthetics as a means of avoiding liturgy. This is not,

of course, to deny that aesthetics often results in new forms of secular adoration. But aesthetics is not liturgy, and there can be no rules for esthesis except neuro­

logical ones. All else is egoism, the conservation of the self against the irruption of faith or unreason. The only way to activate the image is to attack it, but if you rip off the mask that is representation, you make it dead again. That is also the con­

sequence of ethnographic invasion in pursuit of knowledge. But I do not wish to make a plea in favor of magic. Enough has been writ­

ten about Aby Warburg, but there is more to be said about the ways in which the essential tension that arises within every image, every representation, every mask, manifests itself in his work. His work is shot through with a fundamental paradox:

on the one hand, the heroism of his epistemological pursuit of the irrationality that lies behind so many responses to images; on the other, his backing away from

the consequences of the forms of primitive irrationality he identified in both Athens and Oraibi. Following teachers such as Bastian and Usenet,13 Warburg understood

the importance of examining the surviving remains of primitive cultures in the world as a means of gaining a comparative understanding of the irrationality that lies beneath the symbolic forms of Western civilization and science; but in his per­

sonal commitment to those forms and his fear of losing control of himself, he was

unable to see the primitive cultures he examined for what they were in themselves. And of course the only primitive culture he really attempted to examine—before forgetting about it for thirty years, until his own madness returned—was the cul­

ture of the Pueblo Indians, the culture of the Red Indians, which he idolized in

his youth as a form of resistance to the despised Jewish culture of his forebears.14 Instead of himself acknowledging and trying to understand the roots of the Jewish

Warburg’s Mask

7

fear of graven images, that fear which gives images their due, he turned away from it to embrace the iconophilia of the Renaissance, which veiled its fears in

Pathosformein—something that Warburg, like Nietzsche, intuited, but about which, unlike Nietzsche, he could not be ironic. He could not understand the laughter

that underlies the madness, could not risk acknowledging the relevance of the mae-

nadic laughter that accompanies the drunken dance.

But let us return to the Reverend Vo th, “who,” as Talayesva put it, “had stolen so many of our ceremonial secrets and had even carried off sacred images and altars

to equip a museum and become a rich man.” It was Vo th who introduced Warburg to the Hopi, when he went to New Mexico in the spring of 1896, and it was he who

gained permission, if permission it can be called, for Warburg to photograph the Hopi and thus join him in draining their images of their souls and their secrets.

In 1923 Warburg wrote of Voth: “Through years of contact with the Indians he won their trust, and he paid as little heed as possible to his own missionary tasks.

He studied the Indians, bought up their products, and developed a hefty business in the trading of these objects. As a result of the extraordinary measure of confi­ dence he enjoyed, it was possible to photograph them during their dances, something

that their fear of being photographed would otherwise never have allowed.”15 But this is too kind to Voth. As we know from several Hopi accounts of Voth’s activi­ ties on the mesas, he was much resented for forcing his way into the sacred kivas

and for revealing the secrets of their ceremonies in his still-standard ethnographic

accounts of these ceremonies.16 Indeed, the Hopi resistance to having their rituals photographed was not so much fear as a resistance to allowing the secrets to be re­

vealed to others, to the Western heathen, so to speak.17 At least Warburg recognized Voth’s financial motives and the link between revelation and capitalism early on. In his journal entry for May 1, the day on which

he saw the Hemis kachina dance, he wrote: “Stomach upset. In the morning I saw the Hemis Katchina. Picturesque impression. In the afternoon the clowns. Very

obscene. I bargained with Voth. Basest greed comes out. Praying, bargaining, feed­ ing the calf, fetching water, visiting the Indians. The most vulgar egotistical interest,

but the most astute and best observer of Indian ceremonies.”18 In Voth, the greedy missionary ethnographer about whom Warburg was

clearly ambivalent, knowledge and betrayal went hand in hand. But what about

those transgressive photographs? Two days later Warburg wrote with staggering in­ difference to what he was doing: “The Indians do not like to be photographed. I

photographed the albino girl. . . . the children in Oraibi will be forced to attend

8

David Freedberg

school.”19 And he took his photographs, sometimes showing himself or an inspector leering at a handsome or pretty Indian.20

It never seems to have crossed Warburg’s mind how much he might have

offended the Hopi themselves. Despite his own reservations about Voth’s character, he needed him. In fact, Voth had been recommended to him by the incomparable

James Mooney, and it was thanks to Voth’s influential position in the Oraibi pueblo that Warburg was able to enter the kiva on the eve of the dance. As his letters to

Voth reveal, Warburg owed him all the understanding he had of the ritual and of

the costumes the Hopi wore; indeed, in 1896, one year after his return to Germany, he suggested to Voth that they publish an illustrated edition of the photographs of

the dance, with texts by Voth on the snake ritual, and by Warburg on the Hemis kachina dance.21 Of course, Voth was too egoistical to want to share publication with the perhaps equally egoistical young Warburg, and the proposal came to naught.

But there can be no question that in his trespass on the secrets of the kachi·? nas, in his denial of the true symbolicity of the masks worn by the dancers, Warburg

was utterly complicit with the brutal invasions of the Reverend Voth. It is hard to

escape the conclusion that, at this point at any rate, Warburg did not really know

what he was doing, and that in his 1923 lecture he tried to justify his interest in the rites of the Hopi in terms of his desperation to make sense of the gnawing pres­ ence of Alexandria in Athens, of the Asian and the oriental that periodically invade

Western classicism, logic, mathematics, and reason. At the heart of the problem lies the mystery of images.

In 1929-30, Fritz Saxl wrote: “What Warburg owed to America was that he

learned to look at European history with the eyes of an anthropologist. The early Renaissance had found its models in pagan antiquity; and in order to gain an insight

into classical paganism, the historian can do no better than to go to a pagan country.”22 Thus begins the idolatry of Warburg the anthropologist. It has persisted until our own

day. Already in 1970 Gombrich had written that “more has been published in English on this episode in Warburg’s life than on any other aspect of his life,”23 while by 1986

he could comment that “this stream of publication is unlikely to break off soon.”24 This was prophetic: in the last few years the stream of articles has swelled into a torrent. Yet

in all of this there is barely a critical word, barely a hint of the ways in which Warburg, compelled by his own inner demons to find parallels for the Pathosformein of the

Renaissance in the dance of the Hopi and to seek the roots of the ways in which inner

emotion was expressed by outward movement in Western art, misunderstood the

nature and function of both the Hopi snake dance and the kachina masks.

Warburg’s Mask

9

Indeed, there is little in Warburg’s diary of his trip to the Southwest to suggest much of an effort to understand the Hopi context of the snake dances and kachina. There is an undeniable intellectual curiosity about his earnest prepara­

tions for his trip, and his consultation of the literature on the subject of the ancient Anasazi and the modern Pueblo ceremonies in the libraries of the east was certainly diligent,25 but his diaries reveal the disappointingly frivolous and spoiled side of Warburg, as he commented endlessly on the pretty girls he met and on the good

looks of the Indians (often versus the unattractiveness of his coreligionists).26 It is

true that the diaries begin to reveal his sense, clarified in the famous lecture, of how

and why the snake, as a living symbol of lightning, formed the center of a cere­ mony intended to produce rain. Already then, he seems to have been set on

demonstrating, as he put it in his 1923 lecture, the “pervasiveness of myth and magi­

cal practice amongst primitive humanity.”27 But this is hardly a deep insight, and it surely did not require a trip to the Southwest—a trip to one of the last remain­ ing remnants of paganism in the modern world, as he regarded it—to confirm this.

It is certainly the case that the Kreuzlingen lecture yields great insights

into the psychology of the relationship between inner emotion and outward move­

ment, and into the seminal relationship between the rational and the irrational in Western art forms. There is something infinitely poignant about Warburg’s reali­ zation, following his stay in the sanatorium, of the essential tragedy underlying

man’s relationship with myth and symbol. Warburg’s theory is that man needs sym­ bols to enable contemplation, but at the same time they betoken a rupture from

direct contact with nature itself—except that the snake, malevolent demon from

the underworld, is itself a symbol of lightning. So first came direct contact with symbols offered by nature itself; then came the self-willed severance from nature in the creationship of the distancing symbol, the critical stand-in for reality: from

lightning to the living snake, to pictures of snakes, or even kachinas. For Warburg the passage was “from a symbolism whose efficacy proceeds di­ rectly from the body and the hand to one that unfolds only in thought.”28 You can

only be in tune with your nature, as it were, if you have direct contact with it; but you

need the distance afforded by symbolism for logic, mathematics, culture, contempla­ tion. Civilization contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, since the final stage is the direct annexation of nature, by electricity, telegraph, and telephone, which,

as he put it, destroyed the distance necessary for contemplation, devotion, and reflection. Telephonic and wireless communication destroys the symbolic activation of the forces

of nature.29 It leaps across the abyss between symbol and its referent.

10

David Freedberg

But in his diary there is very little of either this, or, more significantly, of

his sense of the tragedy entailed by Western man’s detachment from nature, and then his overcoming of it by violent means, by the modern equivalent of lightning, electricity.30 The diary generally contains very little more than the musings of an

extraordinarily intelligent but seemingly insensitive twenty-seven year old. Perhaps scared by what he had begun to intuit, Warburg rid himself almost as quicldy as he could of the objects he had acquired from the Indians themselves, from Vo th,

from Keam, and above all from the Jewish dealers in Santa Fe, John Gold and Abraham Spielberg.31 Already, in January 1896, he wrote to his parents from Santa Fe announcing that he would “shortly send a whole lot of Indian pots, clothes, and

tools to Hamburg. Please unpack them and have a large glass cabinet made by Knock—like those in an ethnography museum.”32 A large glass cabinet for those

powerful kachina masks, for the lovely pots made by Nampeyo, the genius of the

Hopi Renaissance, then working in Oraibi and never once mentioned by Warburg!33 For it was Nampeyo who turned to the classical motifs of Anasazi art, the art of her forebears, and revived them in her marvelous work. He returned to Hamburg,

and between 1898 and 1902 simply gave them away to the Museum für Völkerkunde

there. Nobody even knows where they all are now.34 Perhaps we cannot blame Warburg for playing the good ethnographer, for

turning his objects over for study in a museum, just as many had done before and have continued to do since. But what can we know of the context of Hopi art and

artifacts in a museum? At least with Christian altarpieces we have in our bones the Mass and the mystery of the Incarnation, which lies at the basis of all Christian use of images. But nothing remains of the Hopi mysteries—nothing—and so we

are reduced to esthesis, empathy, formal analysis. They are the very opposite of mysteries in which the Incarnation is implicit. Snakes are not lightning made flesh,

not even demons made flesh, as Warburg thought. They are indeed just symbols in the remotest of senses (though natural symbols). They live on their own, not as

incarnations of anything else. But to say all this is not to make any simple Benjaminian claim for the

loss of aura that accompanies the wrenching of art objects from their ritual and liturgical contexts. Though correct enough, that would be too easy. By now American Indians’ fierce determination not to lose ritual objects

to museums has become widely known (if scarcely respected); so too have their de­ mands for the restitution of such objects to their lands and tribes. There are few

more troubling and sadder places in Manhattan than the Museum of the American

Warburg’s Mask

I I

Indian now in the old U.S. Customhouse—of all places. In it the fundamental tension between good ethnography and the claims of aesthetic pleasure is stripped

bare. For although the immediate context of the production of contemporary ob­ jects is roughly provided, and hints dropped of the traditions from which they stem,

the assumption is one of universal esthesis, one beyond context, as it were. The old

museum on 157th Street was a truly ethnographic collection, though down at the heels and shabby, and shameful because of the fact that the riches stolen from the

tribes were kept for many years in giant warehouses in the Bronx. But now, in the echoing empty spaces of the customhouse, an even more pathetic remnant of those

collections is on display. Why pathetic? Because the Native Americans on the board of the museum know that no kachina could ever regain its native force in an ethno­ graphic museum, not just because it there becomes no more and no less than an

ethnographic object, but because it ought never to be there, and that even with the most accurate account of its ceremonial context—as supplied by writers like Vo th—

its power and aura are diminished once its secrets are revealed. The mask must remain a mask, not just an object. And so the only com­

mentaries that accompany most of the exhibits now are aesthetic ones, provided by contemporary Indian artists. Ethnography can never reveal the true meaning of tribal

objects; they can only be seen as pieces of art or liturgy. At least with esthesis, some pleasure remains, and some force in that pleasure. So what were Warburg’s mistakes? Certainly he tried his best, as much as any rich and spoiled young Gelehrter from Hamburg might have. But what he failed to appreciate fully were the profound differences—not the similarities—be­

tween the allegedly pagan roots of classical culture and the allegedly primitive

aspects of Hopi culture.35 Before returning to them, it is worth noting one aspect of Warburg’s research into the Pueblos that has been completely neglected in the abundant literature on this topic.

Perhaps blinded by his need to resolve the antinomies in the art of the past and come to terms with the tensions it manifested in the exchange between clas­

sicism and barbarism, West and East, and the rational and the irrational, Warburg failed to take the slightest note of the contemporary struggles of the Hopi. They

were being played out right before his eyes, and yet there is nothing in his notes

to suggest even a minimal awareness of them.36 These struggles might have at least made him more sensitive to the meaning of the kachinas. For at the very time of Warburg’s visit, old Oraibi was riven by a terrible struggle between the so-called Friendly and Hostile factions.37

12

David Freedberg

The Friendlies, as their name implied, were those members of the tribe who

were well-disposed or accommodating to Washington and its representatives, the Hopi who were ready to adapt to the exigencies of white teachers, land surveyors, and mis­

sionaries, all of whom were preparing the destruction of their culture and the

expropriation of their land and secrets. These Friendlies were opposed by the more conservative Hostiles, who bitterly fought the forces of adaptation, modernization, and renunciation, every step of the way. This was a struggle that within a few years of

Warburgs departure would lead to the virtual abandonment of Oraibi itself.38

There is not a word of this in Warburg’s diary, nor a hint in his famous Kreuzlingen lecture. In discussing the totems of the tribe, Warburg omitted what was most vexed about them in both ancient and in modern terms. Not only did

he not refer to the struggle between the revealers and the conservers of secrets, tra­

dition, and ways of imagemaking—a struggle abundantly documented at the time

and played out before his eyes—he also elided Laocoon with a kachina. But as anyone who has been to a snake dance (or even a Hemis kachina

dance, such as Warburg himself saw) knows, there is no similarity whatsoever be­

tween Laocoon and a kachina. The ancient bacchic dances, with their frenzied maenads and their reflections in the swirling reliefs of Francesco di Giorgio and the paintings

of Botticelli, may indeed have revealed inner emotion in outward movement; but there can be no parallel between those dances, Alexandrian in origin though they may have been, and the dances of the Pueblos. In the Hopi dances there are no fren­

zied movements, nor whirling draperies, nor hair fluttering in the wind. The Hopi dances are fundamentally unfrenzied. The steps are deliberate at every moment,

somber, deep, and rooted in the earth. Wind is a rarity, flying drapes nonexistent. There are even fewer of the ululations in the snake dance than in the others. Even those are never frenzied. And there is absolutely no struggle with the snake, as there is between Apollo and Python, or as between the snakes and Laocoon and his sons,

because the snake is not, for the Hopi, a demoniac force of the underworld.

Warburg’s failure to understand any of this, indeed, his failure to listen as well as to look, his ultimate if unwitting disrespect for Hopi culture, it seems to me, is exemplified by the famous photographs he took. He should not have taken them,

since his hosts would not have wanted him to.39 It is true that many others took photographs at the time as well, from the tenacious Ben Wittick—who was repaid

with death by rattlesnake for his intrusion on the Hopi ceremonies40—to the excel­

lent A.C. Vroman and the brilliant but superficial Edward Curtis. It is also true that some of the photographs he (or possibly an assistant) took have a certain ethno-

Warburg’s Mask

I3

graphic value, and are indeed better than many other ethnographic images at the time. But there is something slightly repellent about images such as the famous one showing himself standing rather foppishly kitted out beside a good-looking half-

naked Indian (fig. i); and even more so about the picture that shows him with a kachina mask perched insultingly on the top of his head (fig. 2). A mask is not a hat. Why could he not pull down the mask and, at least momentarily, suppress his face,

the sign of his own identity? Because he was afraid of losing just that, under the power of the kachina image. He surely knew that the masks were pulled over the head dur-

Fig. I. Aby Warburg with an unidentified Hopi dancer; Oraibi, Arizona, May 1896. Warburg Institute Archive, London

14

David Freedberg

ing the dances, that they were

intended to hide the face of

the person who wore them. Exactly this may also be de­ duced from the well-known

kachina dolls given to Hopi children to accustom them to

the faces and names of the

gods who so frequently ap­ peared in the dances. Did

Warburg forget that the power

of the image resides in the fact that the image is always a sub­ stitute for reality, however

much it might be mistaken

for reality itself? The mask stands for the power of all art Fig. 2. Aby Warburg wearing a Hemis kachina mask, Oraibi, Arizona, May 1896.

because of the fact that it is

Warburg Institute Archive, London

not intended to reveal the face

beneath, that it is meant to conserve the secret of the force that lies within it. By showing himself in this way, as

a kachina mask atop a man in full Western dress, Warburg trivializes the Hopi mys­ teries, stripping them of their secrets and reducing them, in a moment of frivolity,

to colorful exotica. But back to the snake. Philippe Alain Michaud correctly noted that “the serpent ritual is a complex knot binding together a number of themes elaborated

by Warburg—from the representation of transitory movements which he observed from 1893 in Florentine art, which he also identified both in Botticelli’s nymphs

with the windswept hair and drapery and in the 1589 Florentine intermezzi whose outlines Rossi described as a series of serpentine forms.”41 But then the usual idol­

atry takes over, in two forms. Michaud goes to elaborate lengths to demonstrate

the similarity between the Apollonian and Dionysian episodes in the Florentine intermezzi of 1589 and the allegedly similar moments in the snake dances.

Conveniently, the furies in the intermezzi have snakes woven into their hair; but while the snakes in the Hopi ceremonies come from the earth and are returned to it, they do not stand for the underworld in any sense that we understand that place.

Warburg’s Mask

15

Moreover, perhaps because of Warburg’s own interest in Nietzsche, Michaud cites the compelling moment when Zarathustra sees a snake slipping into the mouth of a sleeping shepherd: And truly I had never seen the like of what I then saw. I saw a young

shepherd writhing, choking, convulsed, his face distorted, and a heavy black snake was hanging out of his mouth. Had I ever seen so much

disgust and pallid horror on a face? Then the snake crawled into his throat—and there it had bitten itself fast. My hands tugged and tugged

at the snake—in vain! They could not tug the snake out of the shep­

herd’s throat. Then a voice cried from me: Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!—thus a voice cried from me, my horror my hate, my disgust, my

pity, all my good and evil cried out of me with a single cry... .The shep­ herd, however, bit as my cry had advised him; he bit with a good bite.

He spat far away the snake’s head—and sprang up. No longer a shep­ herd, no longer a man—a transformed being surrounded with light,

laughing. Never yet had any man laughed as he laughed.42

This is all very vivid, and deeply Nietzschean, especially in the irony of

the biter bit and the laughter that ensues; but it is completely irrelevant to the case of the Hopi snake dance. What can Michaud have been thinking of, except to fur­ ther idolatrize Warburg by recalling his supposed Nietzschean roots? In the Pueblo

dances there is no writhing, choking, shaking, nor convulsion; only deliberateness. There is no disgust, no pallid horror; and while the Hopi dancers do indeed take

the snakes into their mouths, just as Nietzsche’s shepherd, there is absolutely no

biting—because there is no evil. The testimony is clear: “Soon they were dancing with big live snakes in their hands and between their teeth. Some snakes wriggled

and stuck out their tongues but others were quiet. My grandfather said later that dancers with the best hearts had the quietest snakes.”43 And again: “It would have

been better for me to become a member of the Snake society when I was a boy, be­

cause snakes never bite young boys whose minds are strong and who have not slept with a woman. I had noticed the good behavior of snakes held in the mouths of

small boys, and now I wondered if I were pure enough for that work.”44 Once more, one notes the collocation of sexual abstinence and the beneficence of snakes—

snakes who are not symbols, but reality: “That same year a man was bitten by a snake in one of the dances and nearly lost his life. He must have had a very bad

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heart. When the dancers are not pure or do not pay close attention to their busi­

ness, the snakes get angry. If a dancer has slept with a woman during the ceremony, he will become sick or unable to perform, or the snake may bite him in the dance.

Once a leader was bitten while hunting for snakes; and the old people tell of men

who have died of snakebites when they have failed to do their duty. I decided that

perhaps it was better for me to stay out.”45 The snakes are forces for good, not evil. But there is one aspect of Zarathustras narrative that is relevant, and it is

the one aspect that Warburg could not appreciate. This is the ironic coda about

the shepherd’s laughter. As everyone knows, the most serious of the Pueblo dances always include clown figures, often in transvestite costume and often acting with obscene gestures. These rather shocked the young man from Hamburg (“In the afternoon the clowns. Very obscene.”)46 Nietzsche recognized the redemptive role

of irony and laughter and the transfiguration it can bring (after all, unpuritanically, the shepherd laughs because he knows he has beenevil, and yet he triumphs). Warburg was confused by both: “Six figures appeared. Three almost completely

naked men smeared with yellow clay, their hair wound into horn shapes, were

dressed only in linen cloths. Then came three men in women’s clothes. And while the chorus and its priests proceeded with their dance movements, undisturbed and

with unbroken devotion, these figures launched into a thoroughly vulgar and dis­

respectful parody of the chorus. And no one laughed. The vulgar parody was regarded not as comic mockery, but rather as a kind of peripheral contribution by

the revellers, in the effort to ensure a fruitful corn year.”47 Little could be more an­

thropologically vague than the notion that the “vulgar parody” of the clowns was “a kind of peripheral contribution by the revellers, in the effort to ensure a fruit­

ful corn year.” For no one who has seen the clowns in any of the Pueblo dances could doubt that their “vulgar parody,” full of obscenity, was indeed regarded as

“comic mockery.” The Bergsonian view of the comic is helpful here. For him, it is “that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events, which

through its inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automa­

tism, of movement without life.”48 This may not be fully applicable to the Pueblo clowns, but the significance of the Bergsonian view is his insistence that laughter is the corrective to the automatism of the comic. “The comic expresses an indi­

vidual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate corrective. The corrective is laughter.”49 Laughter, like desire, begins as fear and ends, as Nietzsche realized, as triumph. The resistance to understanding the transformative role of

Warburg’s Mask

17

laughter is surely symptomatic of Warburg’s high anxiety about the loss of self­ control entailed by real laughter. What he could not bring himself to admit was

that image mysteries must entail loss of self-control and the abandonment to the senses (and thus often, obscenity). It remained impossible for him to acknowledge the fact that the mask can never be peeled away, that there will never be a means of discovering the true reality behind the image. That, surely, is in the very nature

of the image. My simple point here, of course, is that images can never be reduced to

mere subjects of ethnography. Warburg himself must have known this, too, but he was afraid, as we have seen, to confront it. Each ritual is different: whether the

Florentine intermezzi with their struggle of Apollo and Python, their counterpo­ sitioning of soft nymphs and snake-laden furies; the deep psychomythic struggle of Laocoon, father and sons against evil; the rainbringing dance of the serpents; or

the fructifying kachinas. But Warburg knew perfectly well that evil was hardly the issue in the snake dance. The notion that the snake dance could somehow reveal

the ancient irruption of Alexandria into Athens, the staining but fruitful oriental into the pure Attic (remember Strzygowski would write Orient oder Rom just a few years later)50 was a delusion, and a dangerous one at that. It blinded Warburg to

the real significance of the snake dance and to the real troubles of the Hopi. It all, of course, had to do with Warburg’s own struggle with the remnants of what he called primitivism in Renaissance art and with the loss of distance

brought about in the modern world. He intuited the irrational force of images, the

force that threatened one’s identity by threatening one’s self-control, and yet he ended up with his Bilderatlas, where the images have little of their original force,

and in their servitude to a curious kind of genealogical encyclopedism, all are

strangely and improbably drained.51 Why has the mythomania that surrounds Warburg not grasped this yet? Either images are replete with ritual, as he seemed to know but wanted to repress, or they are drained and ineffective.

It does not take much to activate them, however. What Warburg’s failed Bilderatlas, pathetic in its reliance on reproduction and multiplication, foretells is the etiolation of contemplation that is implicit in the modern multiplicity of im­ ages that can only be generated and made infinitely manipulable by the

computer—which Warburg, schizophrenic as always, would have disdained and loved at the same time.

But at least, at bottom, before they drove him mad, Warburg knew what images of every kind really betokened. In this he was unlike many of his modern fol­

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David Freedberg

lowers who will not see the power of images, and turn them instead into the driest

forms of ethnography. The tension and power at the heart of every image lie in its substitutional status. It has the full force of the fetish. It stands for reality but its force goes beyond what it represents. The mask is the image, the image the mask. The mask must be put on to make the person someone else, not himself. Warburg could

not bring himself to pull that mask over his head, to become image, not reality. For this would have entailed a loss of self—just like true laughter, not tittering; just like abandonment to sensuality. It is in precisely this, the entailment of loss of self, that

the true threat of images lies. We fear the sensuality of images, lest we lose ourselves. That is why, from Tertullian on, and even before, image-worship has been aligned

with female seductiveness, and why his treatise on idolatry is the open parallel to his

treatise against women’s cosmetics. Our identity is bound up with self-control. The cornerstone of the Freudian view of culture and civilization, as much as the Warburgian and Gombrichian one, rests on just this. We cannot lose ourselves, or rather lose con■? trol of ourselves. Hence the profound masculinism that underlies antipathy to images,

as W. J. T. Mitchell so eloquently set out many years ago.52

The mullahs were right. The buddhas at Bamiyan were the images of the gods of infidels, so they had to be destroyed. Of course there were other motives (as iconoclasts always have), such as the need to draw attention, as some of the mullahs claimed, to the poverty of the people of Afghanistan. Ever since Eratostratos

the destruction of images has served the ends of publicity well. And those giant statues could not even be placed in museums (had the mullahs wanted to), where

they could perhaps be drained of their powers for the sake of other forms of idol­

atry. But there is more. In blasting away the giant buddhas of Bamiyan, the Taliban showed themselves to be menaced by both the inexplicable sensuality of art and its multifold attractions, which for centuries have been held in both East and West

to be as wanton and as little subject to reason as the attractions of women. To the Taliban, presumably, the powers of art, like the powers of women, are frightening because they cannot be controlled, unless you blast the face off a statue or cover

the face of a woman with a burka. Take off their masks, and they will, ironically, no longer be threatening.

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i. The first publication of the lecture was the English translation by E W. Mainland on the basis of a slightly doctored version of the text supplied by Gertrude Bing and Fritz Saxl, who provided the

relevant notes. See Aby Warburg, “A Lecture on the Serpent Ritual,” Journal of the Warburg Institute

2 (1939): 277-92. This edition of the text must now be replaced by the excellent one supplied by Raulff on the basis of the manuscripts in the Warburg Institute library (Aby Warburg, Schlangenritual.

Ein Reisebericht, ed. with afterword by U. Raulff [Berlin: Wagenbach, 1988]) and the English trans­ lation by Steinberg, Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians ofNorth America, trans, with an interpretive essay by Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Both

Raulff and Steinberg offer first-rate if sometimes tendentious commentaries on Warburg’s lecture,

with generous references to the now vast literature on Warburg’s lecture and his visit to New Mexico. For Warburg’s diary (that is, his Ricordi of his visit) along with a group of useful studies, see Benedetta

Cestelli Guidi and Nicholas Mann, eds., Photographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in America 1899-1896 (London: Warburg Insitute, 1998).

2. Already in 1986, Gombrich provided a lengthy “Additional Bibliography” to his 1970 edition of the lecture, and predicted that the stream of articles on the subject would rapidly grow further (Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography [1970; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], x, vii)—which it did, almost immediately. See, for example, among many others, Kurt W. Forster, “Die Hamburg-Amerika-Linie, oder: Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft zwischen den Kontinenten,” in Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990, ed. Horst

Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1991),

11-37; Claudia Naber, “Pompeji in Neu-Mexico: Aby Warburgs amerikanische Reise,” Freibeuter 38

(1988): 88-97; Warburg, Imagesfrom the Region·, Ulrich Raulff, “Nachwort,” in Warburg, Schlangenritual, 61-94 (the best commentator so far on the ethnographic context of Warburg’s interest in the Pueblo);

Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg et l’image em movement. Suivi de Aby Warburg: Souvenirs d’un voyage en pays Pueblo, 1923; Projet de voyage en Amérique, 1929. Deux texts inédits traduits par Sibylle

Muller, preface by Georges Didi-Hubermann (Paris: Macula, 1998), and Georges Didi-Hubermann, “Notre Dibbouk. Aby Warburg dans l’autre temps de l’histoire,” La part de l’oeil, Dossier Problème

de la Kunstwissenschaft 15-16 (1999-2000): 219-35, especially p. 230 note 59, for a few more com­ ments within the context of Warburg’s work as a whole. See now also the important article, Carlo

Severi, “Warburg anthropologue ou le déchiffrement d’une utopie. De la biologie des images a l’an­

thropologie de la mémoire,” L’Homme 161 (2003): 61-112, for the broader context of Warburg’s interest in and investigations into the Hopi. I offer a corrective to the generally uncritical view of Warburg’s

trip to New Mexico and of his analysis of the significance of the Pueblo dances, and of the Hopi

snake dance in particular in David Freedberg, “Pathos a Oraibi: Cid ehe Warburg non vide,” in Lo sguardo di Giano. Aby Warburg fra tempo e memoria, ed. Claudia Cieri Via and Pietro Montani

(Turin: Nino Aragno, 2004).

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David Freedberg

3. For examples of repression and self-censorship of this material, see Freedberg, “Pathos a Oraibi,” beginning with his letter to James Mooney of 1907 (Anne-Marie Meyer, “Aby Warburg in his Early

Correspondence,” American Scholar 57 [summer 1988]: 445-52, letter cited on p. 450), in which he

expresses his regret that because of his research on the Renaissance, he no longer had the time to treat

the reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology, up to his final judgments on his thinking on the

topic of the dances as Schlangequatsch (Warburg, Images from the Region, 97) and as “formlos und

philologisch schlecht fundiert” (Raulff, “Nachwort,” 60; cf. also the immensely self-critical remarks about this lecture cited by Gombrich, 226-27). 4. Published as “Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” Sitzungsberichte

der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Jahrgang 1920, no. 26 (Heidelberg, 1920).

5. For the date on which Warburg saw the dance, see the entry for 1 May 1896 in his Ricordi, as cited in Gestellt Guidi and Mann, Photographs at the Frontier, 155 (“Stomach upset. In the morning I saw

the Hemis Kachina. Picturesque impression. In the afternoon the clowns. Very obscene.”). * 6. Freedberg, “Pathos a Oraibi,” and James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, Bison Book Edition, with Introduction by Raymond J. De Mallie (Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1991). Originally published as part 2 of the fourteenth annual report of the American Bureau of Ethnology, 1892-93: (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1896), 653-1124. 7. Don C. Talayesva, Sun Chief, The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, ed. Leo W. Simmons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), 252.

8. For a balanced yet not uncritical view of Voth, see Fred Eggan, “H. R. Voth, Ethnologist,” in

Barton Wright, Hopi Material Culture: Artifacts gathered by H. R. Voth in the Fred Harvey Collection

(Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1979), 1-7. 9. I have not, unfortunately, had the opportunity of examining Warburg’s correspondence with Voth

preserved in the Warburg Institute Archives, but for a selection, see Benedetta Cestelli Guidi, “Retracing Aby Warburg’s American Journey through his Photographs,” in Cestelli Guidi and Mann, Photographs

at the Frontier, 28—47; see also note 17 below. 10. See Eggan, “H. R. Voth,” but especially Peter Μ. Whiteley, Deliberate Acts: Changing Hopi Culture

through the Oraibi Split (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), 83-86, with a selection of con­ temporary views.

11. Talayesva, Autobiography, 252. 12. On some of these objects, see the useful catalogue in Barton Wright, Hopi Material Culture: Artifacts

Gathered by H R. Voth in the Fred Harvey Collection (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1979). 13. As so often, it was Gombrich who most clearly set out Warburg’s indebtedness to Bastian and his

ideas, as well as that of the neglected figure of Tito Vignoli; cf. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 89-90 and 285-87. See also Raulff, “Nachwort,” 73-75, and Warburg, Images from the Region, 60. Warburg fol­

Warburg’s Mask

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lowed Usener’s courses in Bonn in 1886—87. The topic of Warburg’s relationship with the anthro­

pological and anthropologico-historical thought of his time has been much discussed (by Gombrich,

Aby Warburg·, Roland Kany, Mnemosyne als Programm. Geschichte, Erinnerung und die Andacht zum

Unbedeutenden im Werk von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin [Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987]; Maria Michela Sassi, “Dalia Scienza delle Religioni di Usener ad Aby Warburg,” in Aspetti di Hermann

Usener Filologo della Religione, ed. G. Arrighetti et al., preface by Arnaldo Momigliano [Pisa: Giardini, 1982], 65-91; Severi, “Warburg anthropologue,” and many others), and it is not my aim here to en­

ter into any discussion of the relationship of his own thinking with that of figures such as Wilhelm

Wundt and Lucien Levy-Bruhl or with anthropoiogizing and psychologizing art historians who at­

tracted him, such as August Schmarsow. See now also Didi-Hubermann, “Notre Dibbouk,” 232 and notes 68 and 69, as well as several of Didi-Hubermann’s other studies of Warburg.

14. The issue of Warburg’s relations with his own Jewishness has, of course, been much discussed,

but the implications of his rejection of his Judaism and his consequent romanticization of the Red Indians have not—yet they are explicit in passages such as that cited by Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 20. See also Freedberg, “Pathos a Oraibi,” on his rejection of the idea of any form of Jewish Arcadia in favor of the primitive and romantic Indian one. The full problem of these relations has been mas­

sively avoided in the vast literature on Warburg. It is not that the problem of Warburg’s sense of and

resistance to his own Jewishness has not been discussed (especially when it comes to the Renassiance):

see, for example, the sensible but trenchant words by Anne-Marie Meyer “Exactly what was the re­

lation between Warburg’s research on paganism in the Renaissance and his meditations and fears about Judaism (and Jews) remains of course the problem” (Meyer, “Aby Warburg,” 452). Among the many works attempting to set out the issues, see Christa Maria Lerm, “Das jüdische Erbe bei Aby Warburg,” Menora, Jahrbuch für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte (1994): 143—71, and the words by Raulff attacking Steinberg in Cestelli Guidi and Mann, Photographs at the Frontier, 67. But not even Steinberg

saw the directness of the link between Warburg’s rejection of his Jewishness and his clear misunder­ standings of Pueblo culture. 15. Warburg, Images from the Region, 110-11, translating from the Notizen zum Kreuzlinger Vortrag compiled by Warburg and now in the Warburg Institute Archives. 16. For his studies on Hopi subjects, see the following by H. R. Voth: “The Oraibi Soyal Ceremony,”

Field Columbian Museum Publication 55, Anthropological Series III, no. 1 (1901); “The Oraibi Powamu Ceremony,” Field Columbian Museum Publication 61, Anthropological Series III, no. 2 (1901); “The

Mishongnovi Ceremonies of the Snake and Antelope Fraternities,” Field Columbian Museum

Anthropological Series III, no. 3 (1903); “The Oraibi Summer Snake Ceremony,” Field Columbian Museum Publication 83, Anthropological Series III, no. 4 (1903); “The Oraibi Oäqöl Ceremony,” Field

Columbian Museum Publication 84, Anthropological Series VI, no. 1 (1903); “The Traditions of the Hopi,” Field Columbian Museum Publication 96, Anthropological Series VIII (1905); “The Oraibi

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David Freedberg

Marau Ceremony,” Field Museum ofNatural History, Publication 156, Anthropological Series SA, no. 1 (1912). For indications of the resentment he aroused, see the passages from Talayesva, Autobiography,

251—52; but see further, 311 and 344 where Voth is reviled for having revealed the secrets of the Soyal ceremony, as well as Whiteley, Deliberate Acts, especially 83-86, and Eggan, “H.R. Voth.” 17. Luke Lyon, “History of Prohibition of Photography of Southwestern Indian Ceremonies,” in

Reflections: Papers on Southwestern Cultural History in Honor of Charles H. Lange, Papers of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico, no. 14 (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1988), 256, for a num­

ber of other possible reasons for Pueblo resistance to photography, but it is clear, from any number of reports and accounts that one of the main causes of resentment—beyond the old fear of shadow­

catching—was precisely the concern with the divulgation of ritual and ceremonial secrets. 18. Cestelli Guidi and Mann, 155. 19. Ibid. For recent discussions of the much-discussed Pueblo resistance to photography, see now

Lyon, “History of Prohibition”; James C. Faris, Navajo and Photography: A Critical History of the

Representation ofan American People (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); and Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions ofa Primitive Past (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 72 and 119—20. Both Lyon and Dilworth note that resis­

tance grew only gradually, since from 1870 to c. 1910, there were far fewer formal restrictions on photography than later on. But resentment—and some fear—was there from the beginning. Film was just as suspect, and Lyon, “History of Prohibition,” 241—42, tells the story of how Victor Miller of Pathe was chased

across the Hopi Navajo reservation one night in 1913 by the sympathetic Leo Crane, the resident Indian agent, in order to capture Miller’s film of the Walpi snake dance ceremony (Miller had failed to sign an

agreement that he would only use the film for purposes of research and private enjoyment). I am grate­ ful to Albert Narath for drawing this example to my attention in an unpublished paper entitled “Two

Pocket Kodaks Slung from My Belt: Photography and Its Prohibition at the Pueblo,” 2003. 20. See, for example, the revealing—and slightly unpleasant—photos reproduced in Cestelli Guidi

and Mann, Photographs at the Frontier, 96 and 97, plates 27 and 28. 21. Cestelli Guidi, “Retracing Aby Warburg’s American Journey,” 42, with references to their letters

of 2 October (Warburg to Voth) and 30 November (Voth to Warburg) preserved in the Warburg Institute Archives. 22. As in Fritz Saxl, “Warburg’s Visit to New Mexico,” in Lectures (London: Warburg Institute, 1957),

1:325. 23. As in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 90.

24. Ibid., vii. 25. Much recorded and commented upon; see, for example, ibid., 88; Naber, “Pompeji in Neu­

Mexico,” 90-91; Warburg, Images from the Region, 61-62; Cestelli Guidi and Mann, Photographs at the Frontier, 30—31; as well as Freedberg, “Pathos a Oraibi.”

Warburg’s Mask

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26. Warburg’s Ricordi contain a number of remarks commenting on the looks of the young women

he encountered on his travels in the West, along the lines “pretty face,” “lively and self-assured.” But

one’s sense of unease grows when we read his comments on a Thanksgiving Day party he attended

in Colorado Springs in 1895 a few days before he went to Mesa Verde. He likes Dr. Bill’s pretty daugh­ ter and “ladylike” English wife; he comments on three other “pretty girls,” to which he adds a

self-reproachful emphasis “Aby!”; and then continues: “I only notice here that I do not like Jews. The type is a mystery to me and is here without background and overtones” (25 November 1895, Cestelli

Guidi and Mann, Photographs at the Frontier, 150). When, on the other hand, he sees two Navajo Indians for the first time a few days later, he comments: “A beautiful chap. Strong features with vivid

emotions” (3 December 1895, ibid., 151). 27. Warburg, Images from the Region, 38. Along with several other significant sentences, this one too

was omitted by Saxl and Bing in their original edition of Warburg’s lecture (Warburg, “A Lecture on the Serpent Ritual”). Cf. also “In what ways can we perceive essential character traits of primitive pa­

gan humanity?,” Warburg, Images from the Region,

28. Ibid., 49. 29. See ibid., 54: “Telegram and telephone destroy the cosmos. Mythical and symbolic thinking strive

to form spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance into the

space required for devotion and reflection (“reason” in Mainland’s 1939 translation edited by Saxl and Bing; cf. Warburg, “A Lecture on a Serpent Ritual,” 292]: the distance undone by the instantaneous

electric connection.” 30. Warburg, Images from the Region, 53—54.

31. A great deal remains to be written about the role of the early Jewish dealers in the Southwest, such as Gold and Spielberg, and the dissemination of knowledge about the Pueblos—perhaps even be­ ginning with the now near-mythical figure of Solomon Bibo at Acoma pueblo. See Edwin L. Wade,

“The Ethnic Art Market in the American Southwest 1880-1890,” in Objects and Others: Essays on

Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 167-91, for a broad description of the history of the art market in the Southwest, with much interesting material on topics raised in the present paper. 32. Cited by Cestelli Guidi, “Retracing Aby Warburg’s American Journey,” 46, from a letter from

Warburg to his parents of 31 January 1896, in the Warburg Institute Archives. 33. Although, as noted by Severi, “Warburg anthropologue,” 68, in the entries in his journal for 23

and 24 April 1895, he recorded that he had read the catalogue of Hopi and other pottery that Alexander M. Stephen had compiled for Keam and that remained unpublished until 1994 (Alex Patterson, Hopi

Pottery Symbols. Illustrated by Alexander M. Stephen, William Henry Holmes, and Alex Patterson [Based on Pottery of Tusayan, catalogue of the Keam Collection, unpublished manuscript dated 29 December 1890] [Boulder, Colo.: Johnson Books, 1994]). Salvatore Settis, “Kunstgeschichte als ver-

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David Freedberg

gleichende Kulturwissenschaft: Aby Warburg, die Pueblo-Indianer und das Nachleben der Antike,” in Künstlerischen Austauch/Artistic Exchange, Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte Berlin, 1992, ed. Thomas Gaehtgens (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 1: 139-58 (147-48), also comments on the importance of Nampeyo’s work and justly cites Jesse Walter Fewkes,

Designs on Prehistoric Hopi Pottery (New York: Dover, 1973), 36 and 177, as well as Ruth Bunzel, The Pueblo Potter: A Study ofCreative Imagination in Primitive Art (New York: Columbia University Press,

1929), 55-56, 88. 34. But see Cestelli Guidi, “Retracing Aby Warburg’s American Journey,” 46-47, for a useful overview

of the fate of Warburg’s objects and the useful bibliographic references on these pages. See also the important material and analysis in Settis, “Kunstgeschichte als vergleichende Kulturwissenschaft,”

and the pages in the Jahrbuch der Hamburgischen Wissenschaftlichen Anstalten 19 (1901) (Hamburg,

1902), cx-cxvii (Warburgs gift to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg). 35. See Freedberg, “Pathos a Oraibi,” for the ways he failed to appreciate these differences and how

he turned difference into similarity.

'

36. Compare, for example, the passionate and understanding description of the origins of the dis­

pute and of the implications of the school in Keam’s Canyon, where Warburg had his famous drawings

of lightning made; see the letter from Fewkes to Mrs. Hemenway of 2 July 1891 (already!), repro­ duced in Edwin L. Wade and Lea S. McChesney, America’s Great Lost Expedition: The Thomas Keam

Collection of Hopi Pottery from the Second Hemenway Expedition, 1890-1894, exh. cat. (Phoenix: The

Heard Museum, 1980), 5-6.

37. See especially the good summary in Whiteley, Deliberate Acts (with excellent further bibliogra­ phy and many contemporary testimonies, such as the letter from Fewkes to Mrs. Hemenway cited in the previous note). 38. Old Oraibi is now in ruins. For government harassment of the “Hostile” faction from 1891 on,

culminating in the 1893 arrest of a group of Hostiles and their imprisonment in Fort Wingate, and

of a much larger group in Alcatrax in 1894-95, see ibid., 70-91. By 1906, social order at Oraibi had become so fraught that it led to what has been called the “Oraibi split.” On this, see ibid., 106-18,

and Mischa Titiev, Old Oraibi: A Study of the Hopi Indians of Third Mesa. Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology Papers 1, no. 1 (1944). Following the split of 1906, many of the

Friendlies had already left, and more Hostiles were run-marched out of town then settled in the

newly established village of Bacavi. Other members of the old community settled in nearby Hotevilla. 39. For a good summary of Pueblo resistance to photography, see Lyon, “History of Prohibition.” But

for examples, see also William Webb and Robert A. Weinstein, Dwellers at the Source: Southwestern Indian

Photographs ofA. C. Vroman, 1899—1904 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 14. 40. Wittick photographed the Walpi snake dances from the 1880s until his death by snakebite in

1903. See Lyon, “History of Prohibition,” 245, and Webb and Weinstein’s appreciative but justly criti­

Warburg’s Mask

25

cal book on the photographs of A. C. Vroman (Webb and Weinstein, Dwellers at the Source, 13-14

[“he has not been initiated! Death will come to him from the fangs of our little brothers!”]). 41. Michaud, Aby Warburg, 62. The reference to Botticelli’s nymphs is, of course, to Warburg’s famous

dissertation of 1893 on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring {Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus” und “Frühling”: Eine Untersuchung über die Vorstellungen von der antike in der italienische Frührenaissance

[Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1893]), while that to the Florentine intermezzi of 1589 is to his

famous article on the intermezzi composed in Florence in 1589 for the wedding of Ferdinand I, Grand

Duke of Tuscany, and Catherine de Medici’s niece, Christine of Lorraine (the article appeared in an Italian translation by A. Giorgetti as “I costumi teatrali per gli intermezzi del 1589:1 disegni di Bernardo

Buontalenti e il libro di conti di Emilio de’ Cavalieri,” in Atti dellAccademia del R. Istituto musicale di Firenze, i8®lfe"many other social i? their own physical usé of thetelephoneagw^i'as of contexctsand.meanings. I aio hoped th&tthe mefaph f. the telephone conversation, as an activity which etacts offwithout knowing· wherptl as a model ...................................... * * .......... . for the whole u' ■

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A If students in anthropology fW’ Of the telephone by others, a crucial fW&Mra own experience. Not their theories of me their analytical preconceptions, both about themselves and about other 'telephonists’, can be temporarily brushed aside. I threw them in at the deep end with a mini-project designed to provoke spontaneity, daring, determination, open- mindedness, compassion, variety and wit: as a member of a group of four or five they were to make, and devise the use of, a telephone costing no more than one pound and functioning within that first morning . Perhaps I should not have been taken aback at how resistant some students were to my approach.

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Art and the Visualization of Anthropology

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