PANEL 10: Native Objects, World Histories

PANEL 10: Native Objects, World Histories: studies of Brazilian indigenous objects in European Museums

SALSA XII Sesquiannual Conference – Vienna, 2019

Organizers:
Mariana Françozo, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Felipe Vander Velden, Universidade Federal de São Carlos UFSCar, Brazil

Chair: Mariana Françozo

During the colonial period, Europeans in the New World collected indigenous material culture to be exhibited in what were first cabinets of curiosities and later national museums. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, collecting-mania was replaced by systematic collecting as part of early anthropological and archaeological scientific practices. As these disciplines developed, so did the scope and profile of indigenous collections. These numerous assemblages now housed in European museums are the material heritage of indigenous peoples. As such, they provide a wealth of information about indigenous histories and ways of life, as well as about their interactions with non-indigenous peoples and worlds. In the particular case of Brazilian collections, since the mid-twentieth century anthropologists and historians have been trying to locate and document the many collections taken from Brazil to Europe, sometimes being able to reconstruct collection biographies and object trajectories, other times trying to reconnect historical collections to indigenous knowledge practices and identities in the present-day. The aim of this panel is to bring together researchers working on studies of ethnographic and/or archaeological collections from both a material culture perspective (in-depth object analysis) and a historical perspective (focusing on histories of collections), or both. The panel looks at both archaeological and ethnographic collections as a means to question the sometimes unnecessarily rigid divide between pre- and post-contact temporalities.

Panel Schedule