Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

In the National Museums of World Culture there are about 100,000 registered objects, 75% of these have their origin in America. An interesting thing about these collections lies in the categories used to classify them. Despite the presence of Africans and their children in America since the seventeenth century, they were not included in the records of the cultures that inhabit this continent (at a museological level). In fact, the categories used in museums refer only to indigenous peoples, and everything before the Spanish conquest is registered as archaeology, and ethnography is used for later periods, excluding categories such as history, art, etc. (Muñoz 2011, 2012). The idea that persisted for a long time was to collect objects that represented the “clean” material culture of America, to create an encyclopedia of objects that correlated with existing indigenous groups. The legacies of Africans in America were considered as a deformation (imperfection), a “vulgarity” according to Bolinder (1921) of the cultural. A result of the “racial mixtures”; an argument that reinforced the nineteenth-century ideology of “purity of races.” Added to this is the outlawing of cultures, and the exclusion and segregation of African people and their children on American soil. This ideology can today be reflected in the total absence of the Africans and their descendants in the museums’ catalogues and in the form of classification of the objects; as well as making invisible the past of slavery and colonialism. In this paper we want to reinterpret a collection from the Chocó area in Colombia, today deposited in Göteborg, Sweden. This was collected in several periods of the twentieth century by Swedish ethnographers and re-studied in recent times (Machado 2011).