Travel Map of an Ethnographic Collection

Author(s)

Aramís Luis Silva

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2011-12-08

Examining board members

Paula Montero; José Maurício Paiva Andion Arruti; Marília Xavier Cury; Patricia Teixeira Santos; Julio Assis Simoes

• Advisor: Paula Montero

Abstract

We invite readers to follow us on a journey through time and space, in order to observe the path taken by a number of bororo artefacts set in motion by Salesian priests more than 80 years ago. Taken to Italy to be displayed in missionary exhibitions, these objects were repatriated in 2001 to be shown at the just then inaugurated cultural center of the Meruri indian village, in Brazils Mato Grosso State. By highlighting this collection, we will observe, at once, the social processes that have constituted it, as well as the transformations of peoples trajectories, of collectivities and institutions that gravitate around it. Before assuming these artefacts as elements of a specific bororo ethnographic collection under control of a Salesian mission, our interest is to understand its production as such. Far from a perspective that makes reference to a fixed cultural scale, our journey transforms such collection into a thread that penetrates in a tangle of social and symbolic relations, from which these pieces emerge as moving signs among variable systems of meanings. (AU)