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

Abstract

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.

Museums and Ethnographic Collections; Bororo Indians; Colonial Anthropology