Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

ABY WARBURG (1866-1929) belongs to the elite group of scholars and thinkers maturing at the turn of the nineteenth century who shaped the directions to be taken in the following hundred years. He is known not simply for his pioneering scholarship of Italian Renaissance art and culture, but for the totality of his approach, the interest he took in the whole process of what anthropologists now call symbolization, the creation of symbols by societies to represent their world. This book studies a crucial moment in his development, when, in 1895, diverted from his projected studies in Italy, he crossed to New York to attend his brother's wedding, then, encouraged by the contacts he had made with scholars of the Smithsonian Institution, made a trip deep into the Arizona desert to study Hopi culture at first hand. There is no doubt that this anthropological venture, though he did not formulate his thoughts about it on paper until much later, in a lecture of 1923, both reflected and helped to form an approach to the Italian Renaissance that was to revolutionize twentieth-century attitudes to culture.

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CHOICE Review

In 1895 German art historian and cultural anthropologist Aby Warburg extended a trip to his brother's wedding in New York to include an expedition to the Arizona desert, where he observed Hopi culture firsthand. This collection includes essays by Armin Geertz ("Pueblo Cultural History"), Peter Burke ("History and Anthropology in 1900"), Benedetta Cestelli Guidi ("Retracing Aby Warburg as a Photographer"), Philippe-Alain Michaud ("Florence in New Mexico"), and Ulrich Raulff ("The Seven Skins of the Snake"). Along with the catalog of Warburg photographs and excerpts from his diary, these provide a context for both his brief New Mexico visit and the significant work on symbols he later derived from it. Many pictures are not remarkable in themselves. In Jones's words: "To think of Aby Warburg as a photographer would be an injustice both to him and to his photographs." They are "not masterpieces," but the field observations of a practicing intellectual. That said, many readers will find the images of Kachina dances and Hopi school children forced into western dress fascinating. Historians will be troubled by the facile, and undefined, use of the term "frontier." Upper-division undergraduates and above. R. B. Way; Tiffin University