The Asurini Collection of Regina Müller: art, ethnography, material culture

• Grant number: 21/13829-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: December 01, 2021
• End date: November 30, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Theory of Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Luís Felipe Bueno Sobral
• Grantee: Sofia Guedes Schulte Ulguim
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 19/05567-5 - Historiography of anthropology, AP.JP

Abstract

Regina Müller (1950-) occupies a singular position in the recent history of Brazilian anthropology. She was one of the first anthropologists who studied the art of the indigenous peoples in Brazil. In 1976 she submitted to the PPGAS of Unicamp a dissertation, supervised by Peter Fry and Lux Vidal, on the body painting and the ornaments of the Xavante; in 1990 she published a book on the art of the Asurini. The fieldwork she had conducted among the Asurini resulted in her doctoral thesis, supervised by Vidal and submitted in 1987 to the PPGAS of USP. Today the anthropology of art is an established sub-field of the discipline, but in the 1970s it did not exist yet, hence the pioneering character of Müller's work. The same thing may be said about the studies of performance, which she also carried on then. More recently, Müller has donated her collection of Asurini objects to the AEL, which points out the growing importance of the collection of the history of anthropology in this archive. Despite the delay in the process of donation provoked by the outbreak of COVID-19, it will resume as soon as the reopening of Unicamp takes place. Müller has already presented the documents of her collection to the AEL. It is, without doubt, a remarkable collection, allowing many diversified types of research. One may cite, first, the study of the process of formation of a particular ethnographic collection: the assembling, the donation, and the classification of the objects. Second, the study of the collection itself, with the discussion of important and well-established questions of the discipline: anthropology of art, material culture, ethnographic archives, and so on. (AU)