Scientific and ethnographic images in Brazil: Harald Schultz, Vilma Chiara and Indigenous Peoples

• Grant number: 20/03824-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Effective date (Start): October 01, 2020
• Effective date (End): March 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Sylvia Caiuby Novaes
• Grantee: Maria Julia Fernandes Vicentin
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 21/10506-5 - Between archives and collections by Harald Schultz and Vilma Chiara: research and scientific dissemination connecting Brazil and Germany, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

This research proposes the analysis of the imagery production by ethnographers and photographers Harald Schultz and Vilma Chiara between 1942 and 1965: about sixty films intended for the Encyclopedia film project of Göttingen Scientific Film Institute and about 12,000 photographs taken among 23 indigenous peoples in Brazil. The objective is to discuss such ethnographic, scientific and documentary images, from the perspective of contemporary visual anthropology, and its critical propositions related to themes such as time, movement, language, authorship, representation, communication and scientific objectivity. Therefore, we propose a comparative analysis that tense up the peculiarities of films and photographs, both devices worked on ethnographic expeditions, in order to emerge elements that contribute to circumvent some imagetic narratives about the formation of the field of visual anthropology in Brazil. . Moreover, these images touch the indigenous populations and the trajectories of these ethnographers, especially for the imagination of an "other" history of studies on indigenous ethnology in Brazil - this one that bets on the image as an ally of the ethnographic "data" and, therefore, writing and collecting objects. (AU)