ARTIFACTS, OBJECTS, HISTORIES AND MEMORY. TOWARD A DECONSTRUCTION OF THE ETHNOGRAPHIC COLLECTIONS OF LATIN AMERICAN MUSEUMS.
Over a long tradition, travelers, collectors and, later, specialists in the anthropological sciences undertook the task of gathering objects from diverse communities across various latitudes of the world. From the nineteenth century onward, these collecting practices gave rise to a process of collectionism that gradually acquired an institutional character and became one of the pillars for the formation of museums and anthropological collections in hegemonic countries, to which some Latin American countries were later added.
Today, anthropology, ethnohistorical studies and critical museology have established a fruitful articulation under the epistemological and political approaches of the decolonial turn. From this perspective, working with ethnographic collections demands constant reflection on the ways in which objects are studied, documented and interpreted. The familiarity derived from everyday contact with collections can lead to naturalizing their presence and blurring the complexity of the presence of objects in social life. However, a contemporary analytical approach allows us to recognize that each object constitutes a repository of historical, technical, social and relational information.
This perspective has driven a profound review of the role of museums, questioning hegemonic narratives about heritage and promoting models of research, conservation and exhibition built in collaboration with diverse communities. In this way, museums are increasingly conceived as spaces of dialogue, negotiation and shared knowledge production, where ethnographic collections cease to be inert, folklorized objects and become agents in the construction of new interpretations of the past and present of Latin American indigenous peoples.
The material culture of indigenous peoples is no longer conceived solely as a set of testimonies of daily or ritual life, but is understood as a privileged source for analyzing historical processes, power relations, community memories and relational dynamics. In recent decades, the consolidation of a critical and transdisciplinary paradigm has favored the circulation of conceptual approaches and references between anthropology, museology and other related disciplines, fostering dialogue between fields of knowledge that had traditionally developed independently.
