Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America - by Aby M Warburg

About the Book

Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America translates Aby M. Warburg's seminal study of the "serpent ritual" of the Hopi people, which grew out of a trip to the American Southwest undertaken by Warburg in 1895-1896.

Book Synopsis

Aby M. Warburg (1866-1929) is recognized not only as one of the century's preeminent art and Renaissance historians but also as a founder of twentieth-century methods in iconology and cultural studies in general. Warburg's 1923 lecture, first published in German in 1988 and now available in the first complete English translation, offers at once a window on his career, a formative statement of his cultural history of modernity, and a document in the ethnography of the American Southwest. This edition includes thirty-nine photographs, many of them originally presented as slides with the speech, and a rich interpretive essay by the translator.

Review Quotes

The text casually titled Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America was originally a lecture intended to prove that its author was sane. Aby Warburg delivered his talk on April 21, 1923, before an audience of inmates, doctors and guests at the Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. His lecture is fascinating. In it, Warburg recounts his youthful journey to the American West as the story of civilization told in reverse.

About the Author

Michael P. Steinberg is Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities and Professor of History and Music at Brown University. He is the author of Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival; Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (both from Cornell); and Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music.