Morte e vida dos museus: modos de documentar entre e com os Xakriabá

Abstract

To whom does a museum owe responsibility? To the past? To the future? To the objects stored? This research analyzes a plurality of forms of documentation and recording to understand what Joel Gonçalves Xakriabá called living museums and dead museums based on the specificities, assumptions, and developments of each of these forms of documentation, to whom they owe responsibility and how they are aware of their impacts. Presented side by side, living and dead documentations illuminate each other and increase the understanding of both modes. Dead documentation would have the data collection model as its foundation and be based on the reification of knowledge and its separation from the person who knows. Living documentation, in turn, would understand the recording of knowledge not as a substitute for the person who knows, but as an invitation, a tribute, or a provocation, and would be based on promoting relationships. Living documentation here is centered on the presence, circulation, and presentation that involve people, and not only things, which presupposes another epistemology and another ontology. After being completely changed, can something still be considered the same thing it once was? The revival of culture is analyzed here as part of a vast effort to record that allows the Xakriabá to take control of time and their modes of transformation, prevent the invasion of the past, and make the historical process known. As a project to survey and produce an index of self-knowledge, the revival of Xakriabá culture is analyzed in this research as a living record of culture, especially in the experience of the Waihuku Xakriabá research repository and the continuous, unwritten, and decentralized record of the revival of ceramics. The dead documentation of a large European universal museum is then contrasted with the revival, making explicit its assumptions, fundamental differences, and specificities. Finally, the thesis presents a proposal to slow down our research practices, demarcating three axes that are especially impacted: certainty about the research site and the companies; the possibility of moving around the space following indigenous research agendas; and, finally, a proposal for research documentation that produces effects that are of interest to all involved. The first axis deals with the research location, the second with the research theme, and the third with the research record, and the result is research that is explicit and presents itself, without trying to disappear with the author or let the author take up all the space.