Os Xetá e seus acervos: memória histórica, política e afetiva (Paraná, Brasil)

Abstract

In the middle of the last century, the Xetá, speakers of a Tupi-Guarani language of southern Brazil, were contacted and rapidly decimated, losing 70% of their population in the course of a decade. During those years, vast amounts of documentation about the group were collected (films, artefacts, sound recordings…), covering a wide range of fields (ethnomusicology, archaeology, linguistics…). Though still deterritorialized, the Xetá have now demographically recovered and show growing interest in the collections deposited in museums, which document their tragic history, enshrined in a crystallized and irrevocable form. Nowadays, emulating their forebears, Xetá family groups (re) produce stone axes, animal figurines, arrowheads, necklaces, and they collect films and photographs in which past life is recovered. Categorized somewhere between “work” and “relics”, this production is key to the dynamics of their social life and establishes a sort of logic, both objective and subjective, permeated by concepts of temporality. Reflecting on these dynamics, this article intends to show how “the things of the times when our forebears lived in the forest” create life; in other words, how they reconfigure the Xetá’s political, social, emotional, memorial and temporal lives.

Keywords

• Xetá
• museums
• collections
• history