Where is Amazonia on display (today)? A global approach to understanding Amazonian collections

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Neil Safier (Brown University)
• Thursday 27 February 2025, 15:30-17:00
• Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr. Rosanna Dent.

Over the past several decades, significant changes have taken place in the way that the Amazon River region has come to be understood across a range of disciplines. In the field of anthropology, interventions by anthropologists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, as well as Indigenous knowledge-keepers including Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Ailton Krenak, have transformed the academic (and public) understanding of how Amerindian communities perceive and describe their own histories in equatorial South America, and beyond. Amazonian archaeology, in the work of Anna Roosevelt, Eduardo Neves, and Denise Schaan, among many others, has likewise revealed new ways of understanding the relationship between physical remnants of communities past and the longer histories of habitation and engagement within the vast and diverse Amazonian ecosystem. Even more recently, Amazonian artists from Peru to Venezuela and Brazil have engaged in a creative and politically ambitious rethinking of colonialism within the broader Amazon basin, presenting their work at venues from Braunschweig to Vienna and from Princeton to Venice. And mega-exhibitions like that of Sebastião Salgado’s ‘Amazonia’ or the even more recent ‘Amazonias: El Futuro Ancestral’ (CCCB, Barcelona) have helped bring the visual lexicon of Amazonian rivers, forests, and communities to even more global audiences.

Today, Amazonia is being presented and displayed like never before in its history: in the news media, in scholarly books and publications, in museums, in political discourse, and in visual art. How are we to understand this visibility historically, especially through the presence of Amazonian objects and collections in museums and art exhibitions, and given the multidisciplinary and transgeographical nature of the region? What historically have been considered the confines of ‘Amazonia’ as a concept and what kinds of discourses exist that place different kinds of objects, works of arts, and histories together under a single category of ‘Amazonia’ today? This presentation aims to present the broad outlines of an interdisciplinary research project that will examine Amazonia historically, materially, and ideologically in museum collections around the globe. As digital repatriation comes to be better understood, what role/place/function does it have for the Amazon River region in particular? How do these politics change across the range of media, across geographical frontiers, and distinct legal and ethical regimes of this megaregion? As we contemplate these questions, are there particularly good scholarly models we can use to understand the historical processes of collecting Amazonia in the present day?

This talk is part of the Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge talks
• Department of History and Philosophy of Science
• Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science
• Featured lists
• History and Philosophy of Science long list
• Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site
• List 1
• Philosophy Events
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• hc446
• jer64's list

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.