The Invention of Indigenous America: the role of the Atlantic circulation of objects in the production of global imaginary on indigenous peoples in Brazil

Abstract

For some decades, museums have been recognized as spaces for public debate and civic education, where the discourses produced through exhibitions and other activities contribute to constructing and legitimizing specific visions of society and the world in general. This research stems from the desire to take part in the ongoing debate on the rethinking of ethnographic museums and their ways of producing representations of others, in order to look for new paths and possible solutions (along with those already developed) to transform them into inclusive spaces where to produce a knowledge that is as shared, plural and decolonized as possible. The first part takes a historical approach and aims to understand how some objects collected in Brazil by European naturalists at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries contributed to the construction of a specific stereotyped image of indigenous peoples of Brazil. We chose objects from the collections of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, gathered during the Viagem Filosófica (1783-1792) and kept partly at the Academy of Sciences in Lisbon and partly at the Science Museum in Coimbra; and from the collection of Johann Natterer, gathered between 1817 and 1835 and kept at the Welt Museum in Vienna. The specific focus fell on two objects belonging to the Kambeba people (a bamboo tablet to deform the head and an arrow thruster), a Sateré-Mawé weapon and a series of Munduruku feather objects. The choice was linked, on the one hand, to the different ways in which their display evokes stereotypical views and, on the other, to the possibility of establishing a dialogue with the descendants of the producing populations. In fact, the second part of the work is ethnographic in nature and has as main purpose that of discussing the presence of indigenous objects in European museums to shed light on different discourses, histories, relationships; in other words, other categories historically silenced by colonial power and through which material culture has been perceived and contextualized over space and time. In each of the three cases, the theme of indigenous education as a means of resisting cultural loss emerged as a central framework for understanding the objects, which take on a political character and become tools for rethinking the past, transforming the present and imagining the future. Finally, interesting insights have emerged in the context of the dynamics of collaboration between natives and museums, especially with regard to the changes that still need to be implemented in contemporary museum practice and in the processes of decolonization and democratization of knowledge.