The Pataxó facing the naturalist Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied

subversion of time, reclaim of "culture" and ethnographic museums

Abstract

This article seeks to describe the process of cultural reclaiming created through the relationship that the Pataxó constructed with the lines of text of travel and objects left by the naturalist Maximilian Wied-Neuwied, especially through the contact with the book “Travels in Brazil” and his artifact collection in ethnographical museums. We argue that while Wied in 1816 sought to describe the Pataxó and other indigenous peoples as natural, and savage, as opposed to “civilized”, in a context of the construction of the colonized other, the American inferior to the European; the Pataxó, 200 years later went to meet the original manuscripts and the collection of Wied to reclaim their “culture”, to affirm, through the writings of the naturalist – among other actions – their condition of contemporary persons and not of savage or acculturated people: a denaturalizing and therefore decolonizing act.