Interpreting Ticuna ritual artifacts

Abstract

The act of assembling the collection displaces the ritual artifacts from the social and cultural contexts of their production, giving rise to a fragmentation which constitutes the autonomy of the objects collected as ethnographic artifacts for museums. When Curt Nimuendaju collected ethnographic artifacts, in 1941 and 1942, the heritage appropriation by national institutions based on State policies was an issue, and a significant part of what was collected was deposited at Brazilian scientific institutions. Nimuendaju produced meticulous registrations about the mythology and the Ticuna puberty ritual, and this made it possible to elaborate reflections based on the correlation between those registrations and the interpretation of the representatives of this people on the artifacts and information gathered from the elder ones who were already born by the time the collection was made. This allows for an analysis of the mythical topology of the Ticuna thought.