Introduction:

The Kari'na ceramic tradition through ethnographic collections

“…With the development of Anthropology and Archeology as disciplines, cabinets of curiosity gave way to museological institutions in Europe. Consolidated in the nineteenth century, museums acquired a scientific status by financing their own expeditions for material collection, with a concern with the transportation of the collected objects and their exhibition to a wider audience (Hasinoff and Bell 2015). Expeditions of naturalists in the Americas were frequent in this period, which encouraged the collection of minerals, fauna, flora, and Indigenous objects, in addition to the creation of museums in the colonies themselves (Abreu 2005;Hasinoff and Bell 2015;Kreps 2011).…”

“…Consolidated in the nineteenth century, museums acquired a scientific status by financing their own expeditions for material collection, with a concern with the transportation of the collected objects and their exhibition to a wider audience (Hasinoff and Bell 2015). Expeditions of naturalists in the Americas were frequent in this period, which encouraged the collection of minerals, fauna, flora, and Indigenous objects, in addition to the creation of museums in the colonies themselves (Abreu 2005;Hasinoff and Bell 2015;Kreps 2011). 4 In Amazonia, the scientific expeditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included botanists, geologists, and other natural scientists who, influenced by evolutionary theories of biology, saw the region as a privileged place to study humanity in its early stages of development (Barreto and Machado 2001).…”

“…It is from the archaeological perspective that I write about the ceramic vessels manufactured by Kari'na potters, which are currently kept in different museums as part of ethnographic collections. 1 The history of ethnographic collections is an entanglement of museums' and collectors' histories, and indigenous histories and traditions (Abreu 2005;Hasinoff and Bell 2015;Torrence and Clarke 2013;Velthem 2012). Considering that the violence of colonialism is one of the main elements of this entanglement, it is also necessary to remember that, like other native people (e.g., Rodrigues and Gaspar 2020;Torrence and Clarke 2013), the Kari'na also used objects in their strategies to resist this violence and relate to different institutions and individuals over time.…”