Resumo

OLIVEIRA, João Pacheco de. A portrait of a Bororo boy: narratives regarding the fate of the indians and the political horizons of museums in the 19th and 21st Centuries. Tempo [online]. 2007, vol.12, n.23, pp. 73-99. ISSN 1413-7704.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1413-77042007000200006.

Taken from villages and removed from the context of everyday and ritual use, museum collections tend to be artificially transformed in toabstract entities, frozen by a process in which creativity and reflexivity are not represented. The present analysis of the portrait of a young Bororo Indian, currently located in the Brazilian Museu Nacional, seeks to uncover forgotten and silenced stories, presenting an alternative approach that performs a radical historicization and discusses the play of forces surrounding the portrait's acquisition, classification and exhibition as an ethnographic piece.

Palavras-chave : Museums and Ethnographic Collections; Bororo Indians; Colonial Anthropology.