The Other, the Same, the Gaucho and His Garments

Abstract

Warburg conceived clothing as fundamental: gestures, legible in the movement of hair and clothes, were symptoms of the Ancient World. In the gaucho's clothing of nineteenth-century art this is verifiable. In the image of the gaucho garmented as a moor, seen in the paintings of the “orientalists”, the transit of memory between Eastern Europe and the Rioplatense Environment becomes apparent. Stoichita proposes the turban as an index of the Orient, and, more widely, of the otherness. In the case of the gaúcho, the identity is given by the chiripá or the bombascha. Ornellas, in Gauchos and Beduínos, insists on the Arab origin of the gaúcho. By choosing Warburg’s montage, we invoke Monvoisin and Pallière’s gaucho to find him in Ornellas, comparing the images of each with the narrative of the other, starting from the clothes described by the latter to go back to the paintings, as possible sources that discuss a tradition.