Amazonian Indigenous Cultures in Art and Anthropological Exhibitions

By Cinthya Lana

The book discusses the representation of Amazonian indigenous cultures in art and anthropological exhibitions through the analysis of a series of case studies of temporary exhibitions taking place in museums and biennials in Brazil, Europe and the United States spanning a period of 25 years from the mid-1980s. The book puts forward the concept of ‘minor curating’ as a strategy to amplify access to collections of historical relevance for indigenous peoples and to enable them to develop projects that are politically, historically and culturally meaningful for their own societies through curatorial authorship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jul 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839981616

Book preview

Amazonian Indigenous Cultures in Art and Anthropological Exhibitions

Amazonian Indigenous Cultures in Art and Anthropological Exhibitions

By Cinthya Lana

Foreword by

Laura Van Broekhoven

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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Copyright © Cinthya Lana 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-159-3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-159-8 (Hbk)

Cover Image: By Niels Fock, The National Museum of Denmark Collection

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Abbreviations

List of Figures

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One Primitivism and Magiciens : The Amazon in the Art World

Chapter Two Contemporary Cannibalisms: The 24th Bienal de São Paulo

Chapter Three The Hidden and the Unknown : Amazonian Exhibitions at the British Museum

Chapter Four A Subdivided World: The Amazon in the Musée du quai Branly’s Comparative Exhibitions

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

ABBREVIATIONS

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 ‘Concepts’ section: Tusyan mask from Upper Volta alongside Max Ernst’s Bird Head (1934–1935) (left); birdman painted stone from Easter Island and Max Ernst’s Inside the Sigbi: The Egg (1929) (right) (MoMA Archives)

1.2 Richard Long’s Mud Circle (1984) in the section on ‘Contemporary Explorations’. This piece was also displayed in the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (MoMA Archives)

1.3 Left to right: a mask from the Madang Province, Papua New Guinea; The Cellarman (1946) by Jean Dubuffet; and a Witoto mask from Western Amazon (MoMA Archives)

1.4 Right to left: a Munduruku head and Emil Nolde’s drawing and painting (MoMA Archives)

1.5 Neil Dawson’s Globe (1989) (top left), hovering about 25 m above the square in front of the Centre Pompidou, and Braco Dimitrijevic’s The Casual Passer-By I Met at 3.59 PM , Paris (1989) (Collection Eric Fabre) (bottom left). The analogy between cartography and geography was one of the main themes used in the marketing material and visual identity of the exhibition. The yellow spiral on the exhibition poster (bottom right), which was also used in the catalogue cover, derives from a drawing by Lamu Baiga, a shaman from the Baiga Indigenous group in India, who died a couple of years before the exhibition. The drawing is held at the Museum Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, India (Photo: Béatrice Hatala, © Centre Pompidou)

1.6 Joe Ben Junior’s Sand Painting (1989), approximately three meters in diameter. Ben Junior is the son of a Navajo shaman based in New Mexico in the United States, who creates sand paintings as part of healing rituals, in which the patient would be placed at its centre (Photo: André Magnin, © Centre Pompidou)

1.7 Mandala approximately two meters in diameter, of the deity Bhairava with an entourage of gods (1989) made of powdered mineral pigments. It was made by three Nepalese monks from the Pelgyeling Monastery in Swayambhunath in the Kathmandu valley: Lobsang Thinle, Lobsang Palden and Bhorda Sherpa. Due to the significance of the concept of ephemerality in Buddhism, the colourful powder was dispersed in the waters of the nearby Canal St. Martin, at the request of the monks, after the closure of the exhibition (Photo: André Magnin, © Centre Pompidou)

1.8 Yam Dreaming (1989) by seven members of the Yuendumu community, Australia: Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, Frank Bronson Jakamarra Nelson, Paddy Jupurrurla Nelson, Neville Japangardi Poulson, Paddy Japaljarri Sims, Paddy Japaljarri Stewart and Towser Jakamarra Walker. The large ground painting (5 × 10 m) was made on clay using ochre and crushed herbs mixed with paint. This painting tradition is related to Aborigine totemic systems, and presents three main motifs representing a snake, watercourses and yam. In the aftermath of the exhibition, Aborigine artists transferred this practice onto the medium of acrylic painting on canvas, using a kind of pontillist technique, which have gained broad commercial success (Photo: André Magnin, © Centre Pompidou)

1.9 Nera Jambruk: Front of Men’s House (1989), measuring around 10 m high, created out of an assemblage of 25 pieces of painted barkcloths. The work was made by Jambruk in collaboration with other members of Apengai Village in the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, and represents the myth of origin of the clan. The curators commissioned the piece during a field trip to the region. The roof, on the sides, was reconstituted in corrugated iron, a material that is now frequently used as a replacement for traditional materials (Photo: Konstantinos Ignatiadis and Béatrice Hatala, © Centre Pompidou)

1.10 Overview of the rear section at the main hall of La Villette. Clockwise from bottom left: Cyprien Tokoudagba, a reconstruction of the voodoo temple of the Tokoudagba family in Abomey, Bénin, with murals and a set of sculptures of seven deities from the voodoo pantheon; on the far wall behind it is Richard Long’s Mud Circle , which was also included in Primitivism in 20th Century Art , marking a continuing link between the two exhibitions; on the right it is a Ndebele house by Esther Mahlangu; on the centre is Yam Dreaming (1989) by seven members of the Yuendumu community, Australia (Photo: André Magnin, © Centre Pompidou)

1.11 Cildo Meireles: Missão/Missões (How to Build Cathedrals) (1989). The piece was composed of 2,000 cattle bones (top), 700 communion wafers (centre) and 600,000 copper coins (bottom), with black curtains around it. The installation was first exhibited at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas in 1987, and was rebuilt for Magiciens (Photo: Béatrice Hatala, © Centre Pompidou)

2.1 Installation view of the exhibition Arte Karajá (1984) at the MASP. The exhibition used the stands or display units that the museum’s architect Lina Bo Bardi had conceived in the 1960s for the permanent display of paintings at the museum for the installation of Indigenous headdresses and other three-dimensional objects (Photo: Luiz Hossaka, MASP)

2.2 Overview of Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo on the occasion of the 24th Bienal de São Paulo (Photo: Gal Oppido, Arquivo Bienal)

2.3 Pedro Américo’s painting Tiradentes Quartered (1893) (Photo: Gal Oppido, Arquivo Bienal)

2.4 Cover for the exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), with a chart of modernist art history by Alfred H. Barr Jr. (MoMA Archives)

2.5 Albert Eckhout’s ‘casta’ paintings of different peoples living in Brazil, including Indigenous peoples, enslaved African and mixed race peoples (Photo: Gal Oppido, Arquivo Bienal)

3.1 The British Museum’s Reading Room, ca. 1940–1941. The Reading Room was one of the UK’s main public libraries until the 1970s, and constituted the foundation for the British Library. The photo shows the Reading Room emptied of its entire contents during the Second World War. The Room was restored during the refurbishment that took place in the museum for the ‘new millennium’, but remained closed to the public (Photo: Courtesy of the Warburg Institute)

3.2 Lead-in section with a formalist display, case with a Tapirapé mask, from central Brazil, and a white feather cape of the Macuxi, from Northern Brazil (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.3 Lead-in section with a formalist display, case with Shipibo pottery (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.4 Introductory panel of the exhibition using as a logo (top right) a rendition of a petroglyph from Colombia, ‘probably representing Ni, a river god[ess]’ (Carmichael 1985: 4). The background (left) shows an excerpt of the ‘environmental’ design of the reception area (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.5 Details of the scenography, with fabric covering the ceiling and nature diorama on background (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.6 A natural history ‘vista’ set in a concave space to give a sense of depth, with full-scale photographs of vegetation, overlaid with pictures of animals and Indigenous people. The floor of the display is covered with soil and a few stuffed animals loaned from the Natural History Museum (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.7 ‘Daily Life’: ceramics (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.8 ‘Preparation of food and stimulating drinks’, with photographs depicting how the objects are used (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.9 ‘Tobacco’ and ‘Shamanism’ (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.10 ‘Warfare and Trophy Taking’ with a glimpse of the ‘Ceremonial Masks’ section in the background (right) (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.11 ‘Ceremonial Masks’ section, including Cubeo mourning masks made of barkcloth (left and right), photograph depicting Ticuna masks (centre) and a Tapirapé mask (top right) (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.12 Dummies representing the Ucayali, Campa, Waiwai and Munduruku in full-body attires (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.13 Vitrine introducing the Tukanoan people: body ornaments, shield and a dummy in full costume (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.14 Photograph by Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1903–1905) of a Tuyuca man, which was used as a reference for the reconstruction depicted above (Photo: Courtesy of the Världskulturmuseet)

3.15 Partial view of the façade of the reconstructed house with a signalling drum and a Cubeo mourning mask. (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.16 Photograph by Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1903–1905) found among the archival material of the exhibition (Photo: Courtesy of the Världskulturmuseet)

3.17 The women’s quarters inside the maloca , showing the preparation of manioc flatbreads (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.18 Field photograph by Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1903–1905) from inside the maloca (Photo: Courtesy of the Världskulturmuseet)

3.19 Dummies of men unpacking personal adornments and musical instruments in preparation for a festival (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum)

3.20 Field photograph by Moser (1960–1961) used as a reference for the scene above (Photo: Courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum, 2007.28.4622)

3.21 Dummies of men grinding coca leaves (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserve)

3.22 Field photograph by Moser (1960–1961) used as a reference for the scene above (Photo: Courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum, 2007.28.3756)

3.23 Dummies of a boy and his grandfather sleeping in a hammock (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum)

3.24 Field photograph by Moser (1960–1961) used as a reference for the scene above (Photo: Courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum, 2007.28.4193)

3.25 Dummy of a woman preparing manioc bread on the oven (Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)

3.26 Field photograph by Moser (1960–1961) used as a reference for the scene above (Photo: Courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum, 2007.28.3791)

3.27 Final panels at the last section of the exhibition on ‘The Amazon Today’. The panels include photographs of an Indigenous house made of scrap metal and a Panaré man on a motorbike – the photograph that generated the controversy. Survival International president, Robin Hanbury-Tenison (centre), stands in front of the panel with Evaristo Nugkuag, a Quechua leader and president of AIDESEP, an organisation of Indigenous peoples in Peru (left), and Cristobal Tapuy, an Aguaruna leader from Ecuador (right). Nugkuag and Tapuy visited London in August 1985 to join Survival’s campaign demanding changes to the final section of the exhibition (Photo: Courtesy of Survival International)

3.28 Tapuy and Nugkuag visiting the exhibition on 8 August 1986, surrounded by the museum’s security staff (Photo: Courtesy of Survival International)

3.29 The catalogue cover, bearing a photo by Araquém Alcântara of a flooded forest in the ‘blackwater’ of the Curuá River (top) and a photo by Janduari Simões of the archaeological of the site Gruta das Caretas, near the mouth of the Amazon River, where the Maracá funerary urns were excavated (Photo: Courtesy of Colin McEwan)

3.30 The serpentine shape of some of the subsidiaries of the Amazon River was one of the key references for the design (Photo: Courtesy of Nasa)

3.31 Digital visualisation of the design project (Photo: Courtesy of Bob Baxter)

3.32 Stephen Hugh-Jones’ (1985) visual interpretation of the Barasana cosmology: the circulation of water through the cosmos. The Tukanoans often paint their own representations of the cosmos in their house-fronts (Photo: Courtesy of Stephen Hugh-Jones)

3.33 Panoramic overview of the exhibition, including the panel on the ‘Past and Present’, with the archaeological collections on the left and ethnographic collections on the right (Photo: Courtesy of Colin McEwan)

3.34 Floor plan of the exhibition, with the sections on ‘Culture and Nature’, ‘Social Organisation’, ‘Altered States’, ‘Marajoara’, ‘Santarém’, Maracá’, and ‘Terras Pretas’ (Photo: Courtesy of Bob Baxter)

3.35 Panel of the section on ‘Becoming Human’ (left) and vitrines holding a Cubeo mask and a Tukanoan shield, and an additional section and panel on warfare, which included Munduruku feathered ornaments and a trophy head. The panel on warfare showed early depictions of Indigenous peoples, which had been also exhibited in Hidden Peoples (centre). The other vitrines (right) display basketry (Photo: Courtesy of Bob Baxter)

3.36 ‘Altered States’ (left and centre) (Photo: Courtesy of Bob Baxter)

3.37 Ceramic from Santarém, with detail of visual projections onto the drapery hanging from the ceiling (Photo: Courtesy of Bob Baxter)

3.38 ‘Encountering Ancestors’, Maracá urns depicting both male and female seated figures (Photo: Courtesy of Bob Baxter)

3.39 Ceramic urns from Marajó depicting female figures (Photo: Courtesy of Colin McEwan)

4.1 Mezzanine area for temporary exhibitions, with translucent foliage filter on the window in the background, overlooking the circulation area and the permanent installation on the ground floor (Photo: Frédéric Druot)

4.2 Floor plan of the exhibition: entrance via the stairs at the centre-right and clockwise visitor circulation, starting with the section on Africa, then Europe (bottom left and top right), Papua New Guinea (top centre) and the Amazon (top right) (Photo: Frédéric Druot)

4.3 West Africa installation (1): reconstruction of a burial scene in the foreground, with photographic installation on the left corner. The Western Europe installation can be seen in the background (Photo: Frédéric Druot)

4.4 West Africa installation (2): sculpted wooden effigies (Photo: Frédéric Druot)

4.5 Western Europe display: at the centre is the projection of a twelfth century sculpture of a crucified Christ held at the Church of Therondels, in Aveyron, France, projected onto a light fabric, while the remainder of the installation was displayed in television monitors scattered on the floor, showing images in constant rotation (Photo: Frédéric Druot)

4.6 Papua New Guinea section: the masculine display stand, as seen through the feminine circular vitrine, showing a Kaiaimunu basketry ‘monster’, inside which boys spend time during their rituals of initiation (Photo: Frédéric Druot)

4.7 Overview of the Amazonian section, with the three vitrines installed more or less parallel to each other forming corridors between them, and a final case focusing on metamorphosis displaying ant mats for initiation rituals, a tool for inducing vomiting, and smoking paraphernalia, with their use illustrated by photographs (Photo: Frédéric Druot)

4.8 Amazonian section on congeners, presenting feather headdresses. The installation played with the idea of the layering of the vitrines and its transparency, allowing for the engagement of the bodies of the visitors with the objects and making them part of the display (Photo: Frédéric Druot)

4.9 Predator section: vitrine showing Shuar and Ashuar shrunken heads and a Munduruku dried head (centre). As in Hidden Peoples , the heads were mounted on pole-like structures, which in this case was used throughout the display as a support to install the objects in a way that gives the impression that they were floating in space (Photo: Frédéric Druot)

4.10 Predator section: spirit masks acquired by the MQB in 2005, after a delegation of Waujá people was brought to Montpellier, France, to perform a shamanistic ritual commissioned by anthropologist Aristóteles Barcelos Neto. The performance was part of a series of events organised by the museum prior to its opening in 2006 (Photo: Frédéric Druot)

4.11 Introductory section presenting ‘animism’ in opposition to ‘naturalism’ by showing a native North American transformation mask of an animal exterior with a human inner figure (left) and an anonymous seventeenth century Dutch painting, Sainte Madeleine Reading , portraying a woman reading in an interior space with a landscape viewed through a window. Descola considered that the activity of reading implies interiority and contemplation, while the transition from the interior of the house to the exterior world symbolises a physical continuity with the natural world (Photo: Musée du quai Branly)

4.12 Introductory section presenting ‘analogism’ in opposition to ‘totemism’ in West Africa (left) and Australia (right) respectively. The Australian exhibit is an ‘x-ray’ painting of a kangaroo from the region of Arnhem, which is presented as a prototype or totemic figure. The kangaroo’s visible internal organs and skeleton can be seen by shamans when in trance and represent the architecture of the social body that groups all the species that descend from this mythical being, and the matrix from which the totemic group is formed. These ‘x-ray’ images were also exhibited profusely in Magiciens de la Terre (Photo: Musée du quai Branly)

4.13 ‘Animism’: Waujá ‘Atujuwa’ mask, also displayed in Corps ; in the background to the left is a vitrine of Amazonian body ornaments and, to the right, the naturalism section (Photo: Musée du quai Branly)

4.14 ‘Animism’: three additional spirit masks from the Xingu, including a ‘Kuwahahalu’ mask (centre) from the Waujá, displayed in the same vitrine but behind the mask mentioned above (Photo: Musée du quai Branly)

FOREWORD

In a series of thought-provoking and beautifully illustrated reviews of Amazonia-focused exhibitions staged between 1984 and 2010 in New York, Paris, London and São Paulo, Cinthya Lana’s book examines the extent to which Indigenous peoples were able to influence exhibitions and research practices within mainstream institutions. Drawing upon extensive archival research, Cinthya successfully fills in a gap in the field of exhibition history, which, she argues, has so far largely neglected Amazonia-focused exhibitions. Informed by debates and controversies within anthropology and museum studies, Cinthya shows how, to a lesser or greater extent, curatorial teams failed to effectively engage Amazonian Indigenous peoples as curators of their own material culture in both art and anthropological exhibitions. A string of comparative case studies reveals the multiple strategies employed by the different museums, illustrating shifts and continuities in representational frameworks. The book, usefully, also offers a thorough review of relevant concepts such as ‘primitivism’, ‘anthropophagy’ and ‘perspectivism’. Cinthya examines the exhibitions’ voice and curatorial leadership. How far have Indigenous peoples been allowed to take space and create alternative narratives? Clearly, each of the exhibitions reviewed have had their own frames of reference on Amazonian Indigenous cultures over time but none included Indigenous experts in their curatorial processes.

Inspired by filmmaking practices in Brazil (‘minor filmmaking’), she proposes the term ‘minor curating’ as opposed to ‘establishment curating’ to analyse curatorial practices that are not currently considered the ‘norm’ of established curatorial language (of conservation, collection management and interpretation). Minor curating describes the ways in which Indigenous peoples, or other minority groups, can develop their own projects, conceptual frameworks, agendas, propositions or narratives within the hegemonic context of major museums in urban cities of Europe and the Americas.

Well structured, eloquently written and full of illustrations that conjure up museum modes and aesthetics of the time, the book offers not only an institutional and disciplinary critique that reflects on power inequalities and visibility issues but, through the concept of ‘minor curating,’ it introduces a new possible possible: where Indigenous exhibition making processes offer a radical reinvention of the museum as a political strategy and enable a much needed turn to self-representation. Weaving together Indigenous academic literature with non-Indigenous insights from different parts of the Americas, she proposes ‘minor curating’ might become the new norm.

Much indigenous authorship, agency and activism has for too long been left unacknowledged, repressed and, therefore, rendered invisible. Thirty years ago, while several mainstream museums in Europe and the Americas ‘celebrated’ the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, Indigenous leaders, scholars and activists argued, pleaded and demanded change. The urgency of that change was clearly laid out, but the institutional reaction was, as usual, slow. Much like in academia, the world of museums has been painfully slow in embracing and enabling any change processes. There is, however, also hope in changing leadership in curatorial and conservation praxis being developed that foreground Indigenous epistemologies, scholarship and activism. Much of that work is led by Indigenous authors, steering innovative practices that although not the focus of this book, are very much at its core. New thinking on decoloniality and pluriversality is leading the way on questioning deeply and breaking ground to thoroughly change not only the final products (the exhibitions) but the colonial systems and structures of oppression that continue to inhibit real change in academia, museums and society at large. Cinthya’s book helps us all to travel in hope for change and the other possible possibles that intergenerational thinking from what sometimes were considered ‘the margins’ offers us all.

Laura Van Broekhoven

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book could not have been made without the collaboration of many friends and colleagues whose names I mention below. Luis Rebaza-Soraluz, David Treece and Felipe Botelho Correa provided constant institutional support and feedback at different stages of the manuscript. Laura Van Broekhoven, Luciana Martins, Mark Nesbitt, Christian Isendahl, Adriana Muñoz and the anonymous peer reviewers, provided valuable comments and suggestions. The research on which this book is based was carried out at King’s College London, and finalised at Göteborgs Universitet, via an interstice at the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and I would like to pay my regards to Federico Bonaddio, Catherine Boyle, Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, Christian Isendahl, Adriana Muñoz, Lilian Rebellato and João Pacheco de Oliveira for the academic support and amity throughout the process.

I have had the privilege to discuss the exhibitions considered in this book with some of the people involved in their organisation. A special word of gratitude is due to Cristiana Barreto, Stéphane Breton, Ben Burt, Colin McEwan, Stephen Hugh-Jones and Anne-Christine Taylor for their generosity with both their time and knowledge. I am also indebted to the exhibition designers Bob Baxter and Frédéric Druot for sharing so much of their knowledge and documentation of the exhibitions they designed.

Many people facilitated access to archival material across various institutions. Special thanks are due to Kate Jarvis and Jim Hammond at the British Museum; Christina Eliopoulos from the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Jean-Philippe Bonilli from the Pôle Archives and Dominique Liquois from the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, both at the Centre Pompidou; Jean-André Assie at the Musée du quai Branly; Ana Paula Marques from the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo; Maíra Carvalho de Moraes and Bruno Cezar Mesquita Esteves from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Maria del Carmen Cossu from the Smithsonian Institution and Vilma Ortiz Sanchez from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; Edisabel Marrero and Zulema Zaldivar from the Centro Wilfredo Lam; Fiona Watson, Stephen Corry and Sarah Shenker, from Survival International.

A number of people and institutions kindly provided images to illustrate the exhibitions discussed in the book. I am much obliged to Mille Gabriel and Wibeke Haldrup at the Nationalmuseet in Denmark; Ben Burt at the British Museum; Christopher Morton at the Pitt Rivers Museum; Sarah Shenker at Survival International; Adriana Muñoz and Avigail Rotbain at the Världskulturmuseet in Gothenburg; Rembrandt Duits at the Warburg Institute; Bruno Cezar Mesquita Esteves at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Marcele Souto Yakabi at the Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo and the photographer Gal Oppido; the exhibition designers Bob Baxter and Frédéric Druot; the archaeologists/curators Cristiana Barreto, Eduardo Neves, Colin McEwan and his wife Norma Rosso; and anthropologist Stephen Hugh-Jones.

The continual learning, shared intellectual interests and friendship with a wider network of colleagues, including Ruben Caixeta de Queiroz, Denise Ferreira da Costa Cruz, Yuri Firmeza, Frances Goodingham, Elea Himmelsbach, Livia Lazzaro Rezende, Tatiana Letier, Maria Virginia Nunes Pereira, Igor Reyner, Peter Shayne, Elina Suoyrjö, Rodrigo Waiwai and Matthew Verdon, have been an invaluable source of encouragement and motivation over the years. For the encouragement and support, I am immensely grateful to Júlio, Júlio, Raquel, Colin and Gill. My deepest gratitude to David, my first reader, for the unconditional love and for the constant support in all phases of research and production of this book.

The research on which this book was based would not have been possible without the financial support of CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education, Brazil (12196/13-8). The additional support of King’s College London, through the Marjorie von Schlippenbach Award and the Arts and Humanities Research Grant, made possible the visit to archives in France, Latin America and the United States. The subvention of the Grants Committee of the Philosophical Faculties at Göteborgs Universitet kindly supported the inclusion of images in the book.

INTRODUCTION

Amazonian material culture is among the world’s least well known (Santos-Granero 2009). This neglect can be partially explained by anthropology’s shift of focus (following the establishment in the 1920s of fieldwork and participant observation as the discipline’s core research methodology) from material culture and museums towards socio-cultural concerns, establishing a divide between these two domains (Stutervant 1969; Sahlins 1976). This general disregard for Amazonian material culture may also be explained by the long-held perceptions of the Amazon as ‘object-poor’ (Hugh-Jones 2009) or lacking the ‘harbingers of classical civilizations’ (Heckenberger and Neves 2009: 259).¹ From an art historical point of view, another reason could be that Amazonian cultures only marginally influenced the European modernist avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, whose interest in the material culture of African and Oceanic cultures – often the primary influences for their work – helped amplify and sustain Western commercial, artistic and anthropological interest in the material culture of these areas throughout the century. This lack of interest in Amazonian (and more generally lowland South American) material culture was again evident in the burgeoning of interchanges between art and anthropology that began in the 1980s.

However, over the last three decades, this picture has started to change. Recent archaeological research has brought to light new evidence of early pre-Columbian occupation in the region dating back to the initial human settlements of the Americas more than 10,000 years ago. Additional evidence, including the remains of large-scale, densely populated settlements, mounds and ditched enclosures, road systems, water management infrastructure, ceremonial public squares, wide swathes of agricultural farmland and sophisticated pottery, indicates that complex societies inhabited the Amazon over the last two millennia previous to the European encounter (e.g., Schaan 2012). Anthropology has also taken an increased interest in Amazonian material culture, re-evaluating the place of objects within Amazonian cultures, which until quite recently has privileged the study of the body or of personhood as the main ‘products’ of Amazonian societies, or has focused on the study of human–animal or human–spirit interactions (Hugh-Jones 2009, Vilaça 2009). The publication of The Occult Life of Things (2009), edited by Fernando Santos-Granero, was key to cohering this surge of interest in Amazonian material culture, which Stefanie Schien and Ernst Halbmayer characterise as ‘the return of things to Amazonian anthropology’ (2014).²

The last few decades have therefore seen a ‘burgeoning research into expressive forms produced by Indigenous Amazonian populations’ (Sztutman 2015: 215). A key aspect of this recent wave of studies on Amazonian material culture from an anthropological perspective has been a ‘systematic approach of putting Amazonian notions of things at the centre of attention’ (Schien and Halbmayer 2014: 424) – in other words, approaching Amazonian object regimes not through external Western or anthropological analytical frameworks but by using Indigenous concepts and categories that do not necessarily correspond to those of the West. In this regard, the idea of working closely with Indigenous metaphysics, as proposed by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2002, 2014), has played a key role in this growth of anthropological interest in Amazonian material culture.³

This long-standing peripheral interest in Amazonian material culture within anthropology extends to or is reiterated in the new field of exhibition histories, which emerged in the late 1990s. The formation of a new field focused on the study of exhibition practices, and the consideration of exhibitions as an historical category, initiated an unprecedented re-evaluation of their ideological, political, social and aesthetic dimensions.⁴ However, certain geographical areas – such as Africa (Vogel 1988; Coombes 1994a; Deliss 1995), Mesoamerica (Berrin 1989), North America (Clifford 1991; Ames 1992; Peers 2007; Peers and Brown 2003; Lonetree 2012; Berlo 2015) and Oceania (Thomas 1991; Thomas et al. 2013) – have attracted the attention of academics, museum professionals and curators, from both art historical and anthropological backgrounds. However, the focus on specific questions related to the representation of Amazonian Indigenous peoples in exhibitions from a critical and historical perspective is still a neglected subject within this new field of studies, especially if compared with other geographical regions.⁵ Some of the studies mentioned above have also been concerned with the development of practice, proposing alternative forms of engagement with Indigenous communities and addressing questions in curatorial practices that are culturally specific.

This book further this growing field of exhibition history by focusing on a marginalised area within the field and in anthropology itself, contributing to the articulation of a debate on the history of exhibitions and of curatorial practices that are specifically related to the representation of Amazonian Indigenous peoples within exhibitions. Its aim is to propose a critical inquiry into the representation of Amazonian Indigenous peoples in exhibitions through a comparative analysis of a series of case studies of exhibitions taking place in art and anthropological institutions from the mid-1980s until 2010. The focus on exhibitions taking place after the 1980s is informed by the emergence of debates around the ‘crisis of representation’ in both anthropology and exhibition practices, as well as the development of historical awareness of exhibitions itself, which led to an increased reflexivity and brought significant changes to curatorial practices related to the representation of Indigenous peoples in exhibitions.

The Amazon as a unit of study

Although the book discusses the representation of Amazonian cultures in a general sense, the Amazon is by no means a culturally or ecologically homogenous area. Covering an area of around seven million square kilometres, or 40 per cent of the whole of the South American continent, it extends beyond a single national domain across nine countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela) (Goulding et al. 2003). However, these national boundaries cut across the domains of the Indigenous populations (some of which have been divided across different countries), and each of these countries has established different policies and jurisdictions that significantly affect the lives of Indigenous communities in different ways, and reflect the different histories of their interaction or modes of engagement with colonisers, missionaries, economic stakeholders, national governments and societies. Within Brazil alone there are over 300 different ethnic groups, and nearly the same number of languages, each with their own specific cultures, histories and networks (IBGE 2012).

Since the establishment of modern anthropology, which is linked to the development of ethnography as a method of research (fieldwork and participant observation), the discipline has been defined by the production of monographic studies on a specific culture, as part of doctoral training in social or cultural anthropology. This approach was a response to the predicaments raised by the generalising or universalising evolutionist theories that preceded it, shifting the discipline’s focus to the specificity of each society and emphasising their cultural differences. From another angle, this prevailing approach of focusing on only one group tends to disregard the history of interrelatedness with neighbouring societies, and other groups from further afield, with whom they have historically formed all sorts of relationships (of warfare, trade, marriage and ritual exchange). More recently, there has been a growing body of literature in anthropology interested in understanding systems of contact and exchange between different Amazonian groups, with the aims of shedding light on the complexity of these networks of contacts. Ethno-historical approaches have suggested the existence of different ‘regional networks’ across the Amazon, such as in the Rio Negro, Rio Orinoco and the Guianas regions (e.g., Hill 1998; Arvelo-Jiménez 2001; Whitehead 2003). In the Guianas, in particular, recurring and historically documented movements of ‘fusion’ and ‘dispersal’ between various neighbouring groups – often due to external pressures, such as colonial, missionary and state interventions – have raised questions about the cogency of using strict ethnic identity names to designate consciously multi-ethnical collectives (Caixeta de Queiroz 2008b; Caixeta de Queiroz and Girardi 2012; Grupioni 2015).

There have also been efforts in identifying patterns of movement and migration in the Amazon from a variety of disciplinary approaches, such as archaeology (e.g., Lathrap 1970, 1973; Rouse 1986; Brochado 1984), linguistics (e.g., Campbell 1997; Dixon and Aikhenvald 1999; Aikhenvald 2002; Epps 2009), botany (e.g., Stone et al. 1984) and interdisciplinary perspectives (e.g., Oliver 1989; Heckenberger 2002; Hill and Santos-Granero 2002; Hornborg and Hill 2011) – some lines of enquiry suggest that these networks expanded as far as the Andes, Central and North America. Recent DNA research indicates that some Amazonian groups carry ancestry signatures closely related to contemporary Indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders, suggesting an even wider and more diverse pattern of movement and migration in the Americas than previously accepted (Skoglund et al. 2015).

Comparative approaches in visual and material culture across different societies in the region, and across Latin America at large, have also brought focus to certain types of objects, such as wind instruments (Hill and Chaumeil 2011) and masks (Goulard and Karadimas 2011), or to the widespread iteration of certain motifs and practices. For example, the prominence of the figures of jaguars (Benson 1972; Stone 2011), humans (Barreto 2017; Rostain et al. 2021), gender symbolisms and fertility cults (Hill 2001), or the use of feathers (Reina and Kensinger 1991; Russo et al. 2015). There have been efforts from multidisciplinary approaches to understand the region dynamically, through historical processes of change, interconnectedness, movement and migration, therefore tensioning the spectrum between difference and similarity across the various groups in the region.

From a more immaterial perspective, scholars such as Viveiros de Castro (1998) and Philippe Descola (2005) have advanced the idea of the existence of a shared major Amazonian cosmological or philosophical system of thought, through the concepts of perspectivism and animism, respectively, which were formulated as an attempt to synthesise a multiplicity of empirical and ethno-historical data, based both on their own field experience and on a large body of ethnographic literature by other anthropologists working in the area. Aparecida Vilaça (2005) argues that such propositions draw primarily from French anthropology, owing particular allegiance to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism (and his later post-structuralism) developed from his comparative studies of myths in the Americas. Lévi-Strauss used the term ‘Amerindian’ to refer in general terms to the Indigenous populations of the Americas (Lévi-Strauss 1991, cited in Vilaça 2005: 457).⁶ However, it is more currently used by his disciples (e.g., Descola, Viveiros de Castro) to refer to lowland South American native peoples, and is based on the premise of a broader system of network of mythological narratives, cultural practices and philosophical thinking in the Amazon. Both Lévi-Strauss’s term ‘Amerindian’ and the Amazonian cosmological universals or syntheses proposed by Viveiros de Castro and Descola have become established within the discipline – although they have met with criticism from more pragmatist anthropological approaches for forging overgeneralisations or the portrayal of the Amazon as a supposedly homogenous cultural area, for not engaging with contradictions, or ‘deferring’ the critique of real-world politics, and for positing Amazonian societies as completely other to Western ones (e.g., Turner 2009; Ramos 2012; Bessire and Bond 2014; Vigh and Sausdal 2014; Argyrou 2016). Yet, if not a cultural or ecological unity (since there are many levels of cultural, linguistic, social and political distinction within the Amazon, as well as differences in its landscape), the Amazon has come to form a cohesive area of theoretical debate in anthropological, archaeological and multidisciplinary discussions, incorporating shared methodological, thematic and conceptual concerns.

Exhibition history as a field of study

Mary Anne Staniszewski argues that, until the 1980s, scholars had ‘rarely addressed the fact that a work of art, when publicly displayed, almost never stands alone: it is always an element within a permanent or temporary exhibition created in