Skin, paper, tiles: a cross-cultural history of Kadiwéu art

This article focuses on the global traffic in images relating to Kadiwéu culture in South America, analyzing the extent to which they are entangled in the group’s continuing sense of presence. It begins with Kadiwéu designs as they appeared in the sketchbook of the artist-explorer Guido Boggiani in the late nineteenth century. It then explores the mapping of Kadiwéu territory and the practices and protocols informing a politics of land rights, cultural property and economic survival, looking in particular at the commissioning of Kadiwéu designs for a housing estate and an associated exhibition in Berlin early in the twentieth-first century. By developing a cross-cultural history of Kadiwéu art that considers the transnational networks across different times and spaces, including the case of a transcultural history of copyright, the article seeks to contribute to the ongoing re-thinking of the colonial archive and its afterlife

A arqueologia dos fermentados: a etílica história dos Tupi-Guarani

O consumo de bebidas fermentadas é geralmente negligenciado pela literatura arqueológica, que trata a questão como tema de interesse secundário (recreativo) na história das populações humanas. Entretanto, a literatura etnográfica das sociedades indígenas das terras baixas sul-americanas indica exatamente o oposto: é o alimento vegetal sólido e não alcoólico que tende a possuir um papel secundário na vida cotidiana e ritualística de diversos coletivos. Os dados arqueológicos aprofundam temporalmente essa relação entre o ser humano e os fermentados. Além disso, os vasos cerâmicos arqueológicos utilizados para o preparo e consumo desses fermentados são fundamentais para a compreensão de processos e eventos históricos que modelaram a dispersão de uma série de grupos pelo continente

Some problems with property ascription

We discuss the practice of property ascription in anthropology. While recognizing that it is an inevitable and often useful way to convey the knowledge that anthropologists have acquired through ethnographic fieldwork, we identify three of the most common ways in which ascription can be misleading. First, when a property is ascribed to a collective entity, but it is unevenly distributed among social sub-groupings; second, when an ascribed mental property is alleged to cause an individual's behaviour, but the property proves to be empirically unsupported; third, when a belief is ascribed to an individual, while another belief that effectively contradicts the first one is also entertained by that same individual. We review anthropological and psychological solutions to these problems