For decades, museums have been recognized as spaces for public debate and civic education, where discourses produced through exhibitions and other activities contribute to the construction and legitimation of particular views of society and the world. The research presented in this book stems from a desire to engage in the ongoing debate aimed at rethinking ethnographic museums and their ways of producing representations of others. It seeks to explore new ways and possible solutions, alongside existing ones, to transform these spaces into inclusive environments for the production of knowledge that is as shared, plural, and decolonized as possible.
The focus is on some artifacts belonging to two Brazilian Indigenous populations, but kept and exhibited in two ethnographic museums in Lisbon and Vienna. Specifically, a Kambeba bamboo board for flattening the head of newborn babies, collected by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira during the Philosophical Journey of 1783–1792 and kept at the Academy of Sciences in Lisbon, and a set of Munduruku feather works collected by the Austrian naturalist Johann Natterer between 1817 and 1835 and kept at the Völkerkundemuseum in Vienna.
By combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the aim is, on one hand, to show the role of objects in producing a specific stereotypical image of Brazilian natives, and, on the other hand, to discuss the presence of Indigenous objects in European museums to bring out different discourses, histories, and categories that have been silenced by colonial power and through which material culture is perceived and contextualized across time and space.
