The Shape of Kubler: George A. Kubler in Peru, 1948-49

Abstract

Yale art history professor George Kubler’s seminal 1962 publication The Shape of Time is, according to his own words, representative of a “crossroads between the history and anthropology of art.” This work does not stand alone, but is rather part of a larger corpus of study through which Kubler recurred to disciplines, methods and tools outside of what is traditionally considered art historical—including anthropology, architectural representation, and biology—in order to generate new readings and understandings of the history of South and Central American art. This thesis takes a look into a year of Kubler’s life in 1948-49, spent in Peru conducting archival research and field work on culture change with the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution and teaching a seminar on the use of archival sources in ethnology at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima; during this time, Kubler also engaged in the construction of an archive of his own. Drawing from correspondence and other records from the period in question, a series of lost episodes resurface, providing a reconstruction of various strata of 1940s Peruvian society: an increasingly cosmopolitan Lima stands in stark contrast to the underdeveloped, feudal Andean world, evidencing its colonial underpinnings. I contend that witnessing the coexistence of various temporalities within a single geographic territory had a significant impact on Kubler’s later theories on spatialized historical time.