DOS What did Oraibi give to Aby Warburg? And what does America gain?

Abstract

In order to answer the double question presented in our title, we present positive and negative points related to Warburg's trip to America, reflecting on what we gave and gained from this experience. Discussing aspects of the collection of artifacts, photographs and the scattered records of this encounter-disagreement, we highlight the consequences of his methodological conceptualization of the history of art, as a science of culture, also considering issues to be overcome within the scope of historiographical practice. We demonstrate that her experience in the Amerindian field, on the one hand, collides with questions related to structuralisms and privileges currently debated in the context of decolonial studies, gender and aesthetics (philosophical and psychological). On the other hand, impelling us to overcome – albeit in a philosophical way, but in a political and practical way, not abstractly – with the current conditions of criticism and “occupation” in art, it also gives us an epistemological orientation. Guided by word, image, orientation and action, it multiplies the free eyes of history, reveals subjectivities, ambiguities and coexistences, and expands borders, sources and notions about art and culture.