The Invention of Indigenous America

Explores the historical and semantic trajectories of artifacts from two Brazilian Indigenous groups, examining stereotypes and Indigenous communities' views on their heritage.

The book presents recent research on the geographical, historical, and semantic trajectories of some artifacts belonging to two Brazilian Indigenous populations, but kept and exhibited in two ethnographic museums in Vienna and Lisbon. Located within the debate on the rethinking and decolonization of ethnographic collections and museums, its main objective is to investigate the role of material culture in the production of a stereotyped imaginary of the Amazonian Indigenous groups Kambeba and Munduruku. On one hand, it analyzes eighteenth-and nineteenth-century chronicles and illustrations produced by the naturalists who collected the objects in question; on the other hand, it pays attention to the perspectives of contemporary members of the local communities on such processes and on the ways in which their heritage has been and is being treated.