ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Out of Amazonia: Museums, Collections, and Object-Oriented Ontologies

• In Event: Collecting Amazonian Knowledges

English Abstract

At the intersection of museum studies, object-oriented ontologies, material culture, and Indigenous understandings of nature and the natural world, this presentation seeks to bring the perspectives of anthropologists, museum curators, native communities, and historians together into a single frame in order to discuss the place of Amazonian objects within and without the Amazonian region. What were the pathways or itineraries that brought these objects into the collections where they now, temporarily or permanently, reside? How were the natural materials used to create these objects – including but not limited to fibers, seeds, resins, and barks – imbued by Indigenous communities with meaning and significance, and what role do these meanings continue to have even within the “inert” environments that modern museums are meant to provide? Following a brief theoretical discussion about the role of the history of science as a crossroads for the history of objects and object-oriented ontologies, I will briefly discuss two case-studies from my ongoing research project – one from the scientific voyage of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira to the Brazilian Amazon (1783-1792) and – if time allows – another from the scientific travels in the Ecuadorian Amazon of the Spanish aviator Francisco Iglesias in the 1930s.

Author

• Neil Safier, Brown University