Ethnographic museums: object, cosmology and ritual

Abstract

The reflections presented below deal with the topic involving museums, Amerindian populations and researchers (museologists, archaeologists and anthropologists), and take as a reference the Kuahí Museum, located in the municipality of Oiapoque, state of Amapá, and the Historical and Pedagogical India Vanuire, located in Tupã, a municipality in the state of São Paulo. What is the problem with reflection? The construction of participatory museums, in their formulation, management and organization of exhibitions and the expansion of the concept and processes of heritage. In other words, museums that present a transversality between museums about Indians, museums with Indians and museums of Indians. In the field of anthropology, such discussions have been theoretically held based on questions about the ethical dimension of the anthropologist's work. The so-called “anthropology of action”, which serves to think about the ethical responsibilities of anthropological work, is central to the reflection presented here. This responsibility, as suggested by the transversality between the three types of museums, implies doing anthropology in a dialogical way, a communicative action. In other words, carrying out ethnographic work, from this perspective, requires opening up to the (ethical) questions that this work proposes. Therefore, the objective of the article is to take the objects of material culture, exhibited in the two museums, linked to rituals and cosmology, to think about how the organization of the exhibitions express what is understood by participatory museums. Methodologically, the data were collected according to classic anthropological procedures: ethnography, that is, data collection in locus through coexistence with the subjects involved. And also bibliographic reference.