Between Enlightenment and Structuralism: Bororo and Kadiwéu Collections outside Brazil, 1791–1938

Summary

From the Philosophical Voyage to Brazil of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira in 1791 to the Brazilian fieldwork of the young philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss from 1936 to 1938, nearly 4000 Bororo artifacts and more than 300 Kadiwéu pots were collected for museums in Europe and the United States by naturalists, anthropologists, missionaries, artists, and adventurers. What began as part of the project of the Enlightenment to catalog the world based on the principles of Linnean taxonomy turned into a salvage operation to preserve vanishing traditional cultures. The objects filled the shelves of the storage rooms of museums, were more rarely seen in their exhibition halls, and almost never engaged the productive curiosity of scholars. This paper uses the Bororo and Kadiwéu cases to illustrate aspects in the history of ethnographic collecting and shows how the virtual gathering of this now widely scattered monumental corpus may at last be put to some beneficial use for new anthropological approaches and for the benefit of the source communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20075