Looking back ahead: a short history of collaborative work with indigenous source communities at the Weltmuseum Wien

Claudia Augustat,Wolfgang Kapfhammer

doi:10.1590/1981.81222017000300005

Abstract

Abstract In the last few years, collaborating with representatives of indigenous communities became an important topic for European ethnographic museums. The Weltmuseum Wien (former Museum of Ethnology Vienna, Austria) adheres to this form of sharing cultural heritage. Its Brazilian collection offers rich opportunities to back up Amazonian cultures in their struggle for cultural survival. However, to establish collaborative work in a European museum on a sustained basis is still a difficult endeavor. The article will discuss the projects which have been realized during the past five years with several groups from Amazonia, such as the Warí, Kanoé, Makushí, Shipibo and Sateré-Mawé. Projects were carried out in Austria, Brazil, and Guyana and ranged from short visit to longer periods of co-curating an exhibition. As for the Museum, results are documented in the collection, in two exhibitions and in the accompanying catalogues. It is less clear what the indigenous communities might take away from such collaborations. It will be argued that museum collaborations can help establish a new contact zone, ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’, in which members of heritage communities are able to break through the silence in the old contact zone and finally make their own voices heard.

Highlights

In the last few years, collaborating with representatives of indigenous communities became an important topic for European ethnographic museums
Focusing on written culture, Assmann recognizes the potential of material objects as bearers of cultural memory. He stresses that societies develop their own specific culture of remembering (Assmann, 1992). These differences become apparent if we look at what happens with the possessions of the dead in our own in contrast to many Amazonian societies
The narrative establishes a field of alimentary relations between human and non-human agents of the forest. This way, the inspection of the utensils on the museum contact zone opened a space for reflection on some basic principles of indigenous “eco-sophia” embedded in a “cosmic food-web” (Århem, 1996), but there is more to it: the myth on the origin of animals recounts the distribution of hierarchies within this web of human, non-human, and more-than-human relationships: who potentially survives on account of her subjectivity as a predator, who potentially loses her subjectivity and will be objectified by being preyed upon, and who is exempt from this web of mutual predation like the giant anteater, who is “subjectified” into the higher order of a “spirit master”, whose assistance will be sought after by human shamans longing to become more than human