El águila, el jaguar y la serpiente: Miguel Covarrubias y el debate del difusionismo

Abstract

This paper analyzes Covarrubias adhesion to Gordon Eckholm’s and Robert Heine-Geldern’s expertise on cultural contacts between The Pacific, the Americas and South East Asia. It also focuses on the lesser known impact of Carl Schuster on the first volume of Covarrubias’s work: The Eagle, the Jaguar and the Serpent: Indigenous Art in the Americas. In the first pages of this book he declares his interest in the so called “subversive diffusionism” and mentions enthusiastically the XXIXth Americanist Congress held in September of 1949 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. A strong debate on Diffusionism took place in a series of sessions with the intent to probe cultural and racial contacts between the new and the old world (China and Japan). At the same time an exhibition, “Across the Pacific”, organized by the anthropologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History, Gordon Eckholm, meant to compare ritual and artistic objects to reinforce the idea of cultural contacts between distant geographical areas. The exhibit suggested a way of organizing materi-al culture within a diversity of themes and motifs that were of interest to Covarrubias and influenced the writing of his book: The The Eagle, the Jaguar and the Serpent: Indigenous Art of the Americas (1954).