Certain artifacts placed in museums are known as ethnographic objects. They represent important sources of advice to a wide range of interpretive studies in the field of human sciences: material culture, traditional technologies, anthropology, art, art history and ethnohistory, migratory processes, cultural exchanges, and appropriations as a result of contact situations. It should then ask why the technical reserves of ethnographic museums are not crowded with researchers poring over such sources of information? The irreducibility of the same ethnographic objects can be an impediment, but what else can be said? The article intends to focus the ethnographic object and the study of ethnographic collections, not properly formulating new concepts, but transposing the meanings and interactions that contributed to the redefinition of this class of objects. From this discussion, areas for explorations are addressed to study the potential of ethnographic collections in the context of Amerindian exchange networks.
Amerindians; Collecting; Collections; Ethnographic object; Exchange networks