Objects of “imprisonment”: Diasporic museum collections on ethnographic display

Abstract

The article reflects on the place and the narratives in which collections of the Afro-Brazilian diaspora are inscribed in the context of ethnographic museums in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Presenting a brief sociohistorical analysis of two collections, one in the Civil Police Museum and the other in the Édison Carneiro Folklore Museum, it demonstrates how different regimes of knowledge are used to “imprison” objects of faith as museum objects in the eyes of the police or in those of ethnographers. “Incarcerated” in museums, these collections have been kept by state institutions that frame them either as testimonies of offenses to the public order, or as objects of folklore, religious artifacts disconnected from terreiros. Finally, recurring to a theoretical framework of nonduality to provoke museum's stable categories, the article considers the current transformative role of museums in the “liberation” of a diasporic heritage, by proposing dialogue and collaboration as important elements in the liminal work of musealization. Ultimately, what is at stake in the case of Afro-Brazilian sacred materials kept in museums is the ability of objects disassociated from their ritual context to transmit the sacred in the museum environment.