A Forgotten Adivasi Landscape: Museums and Memory in western India

This article focuses on processes of remembering, forgetting and re-remembering. It examines a fundamental tension between the project of retrieving an adivasi past, initiated by an adivasi museum in rural western India, and the social and material landscape surrounding it, characterised instead by fragmentation and separation from the identity of adivasi. The article reflects on a collaborative research project between the researcher, young adivasi curators and inhabitants of the area adjoining the museum. It shows how, while curators engaged in a project of recuperation, at the same time, they were distancing themselves from their traditional identity by joining reform movements and new religious sects. Processes of memory and forgetting, however, also co-existed. People held multiple identities and the process of retrieving the past also called for transformation and reform. The article is a timely contribution to debates about adivasi identity, social transformation and religious reform. It also offers a reflection on the new role of indigenous museums and their potential to address a ‘crisis of postcolonial memory’ (Werbner 1998). Finally, it contributes to discussions of methodology with a focus on the collaborative process of collecting and its role in eliciting or preventing certain kinds of memories

A reinvenção do eu através do discurso: narrativa, estigma e anonimato nas Famílias Anônimas

Tendo como objeto empírico a associação Famílias Anônimas, neste ensaio procuro analisar três aspectos distintos relacionados entre si pela abordagem terapêutica preconizada por estes grupos: a) o uso da narrativa oral e a troca de experiências comuns como forma de aquisição de novos significados e novas formas de atuação em relação ao problema que leva os membros a procurarem tal associação; b) o conflito entre o discurso e a prática, considerando sobretudo a dicotomia "Eu, membro de Famílias Anônimas" e "Eu, pai/ mãe de um toxicodependente"; e c) o recurso ao anonimato como elemento que permite a gestão do estigma e da informação pessoal que cada membro dá de si próprio.<br>Taking the Families Anonymous association as its empirical object, this essay analyzes three distinct aspects inter-related by the therapeutic approach adopted by these groups: a) the use of oral narrative and the exchange of shared experiences as a form of acquiring new meanings and new forms of responding to the problem that first led the family members to contact the association; b) the conflict between discourse and practice, focusing above all on the dichotomy between ‘I, member of Families Anonymous’ and ‘I, father/mother of a drug addict,’ and c) the recourse to anonymity as an element that allows control of the stigma and personal information that each member gives about him or herself