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
