• 1 Gliozzi, Giuliano, Differenze e uguaglianze nella cultura europea moderna, Nap (...)
• 2 Almeida, Maria Regina Celestino de, Os índios na história do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, FGV (...)
• 3 Monteiro, John, “The Crisis and Transformations of Invaded Societies: coastal Brazil (...)
• 4 Jean de Lèry was a French Calvinist minister who reached Brazil in 1555 together with (...)
• 5 Hans Staden was a German explorer who, in 1549, boarded a Portuguese ship headed to (...)
• 6 André Thevet was a Catholic French priest who also arrived in Brazil in 1555.
• 7 Both the terms of “Tupiniquins” and “Tupinamba” are macro-ethnonyms that included severa (...)

2In this paper, we shall focus on European interpretations of native peoples, a process which implied the physical and conceptual classification of indigenous societies in order to understand and dominate the ‘wonderful new’ reality they represented1. The creation of specific criteria to encompass the category of “indigenous” and its presumed “authenticity” changed according to the interests of the European power involved. The popular trend that represents indigenous groups as forming a homogeneous, compact front against the European invader is extremely misleading. South American coasts were not exclusive to the Portuguese but were disputed among different Europeans powers including the French and the Dutch, all of whom established a series of transversal alliances with the indigenous groups inhabiting their various areas of influence2. The socio-political configuration of the innumerable communities was actually very fluid and was constantly being restructured in accordance to a complex network where relationships were defined by dynamics of conflict and alliance3. Travel accounts such as those of Jean de Léry4, Hans Staden5 and André Thevet6 show how the Portuguese were allied with the macro-group of Tupiniquins7, while the French forged ties with the Tupinambá, with whom they shared hatred for the Portuguese.

• 8 Lindo, Luiz Antônio, “A carta Mundus Novus de Vespucci e a lenda do homem natural de Rou (...)
• 9 Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela, Cultura com aspas e outros ensaios, São Paulo, Ubu (...)
• 10 In this section, only few are taken into consideration. For an exhaustive review of the (...)
• 11 Carneiro da Cunha, op. cit.
• 12 Friedman, John Block, Monstruous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. London, Ha (...)

3This aspect contributed to the creation of several images of indigenous people, often ambiguous and contradictory. They appeared as docile and gentle people, whose large, naked, beautifully shaped bodies recalled Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, and at the same time, primaeval lust and sexuality. Also warfare, anthropophagy and the apparent lack of private property, political organization or religion encouraged Europeans to classify the natives as animal-like savages totally alien to any form of reason8. Considered by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha as the “basic inventory of would be said about the Indians from that moment on”9, these images gradually pervaded the European imaginary, influencing literary and iconographic production10 and slowly merging into the creation of a stereotype that would serve as a bases for subsequent representations11. When facing this production, it is important to stress the influence of mediaeval imaginary and travel literature on European perception. According to the Bible and ancient sources, before America entered the “known world”, weird, marvelous and frightening beings populated the lands of India, Ethiopia, Eastern Europe, the Far East and other peripherical, little-known, mysterious spaces12. Therefore, if we consider Colombo’s initial huge misunderstanding deriving from his belief that he had reached India, it comes as no surprise that all these expectations were projected onto the South American territory. Even when it became clear that what they thought was India was actually a whole new continent, their attempt to interpret those unknown, exotic territories through familiar categories transformed some legendary creatures into real symbols of the land.

• 13 Curtin, Philip D., Economic Change in Pre-colonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the (...)
• 14 Carneiro da Cunha, op. cit.; Langfur, Hal, “Introduction: Recovering Brazil’s (...)
• 15 Almeida, op. cit.
• 16 Thomas, Nicholas, Entangled Objects, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, (...)

5Traditionally, the narrative built on the material encounter between European and non-European cultures reveals that indigenous people were willing to give anything they possessed in exchange for highly-desired European goods, which were mostly considered by the latter as knick-knacks. This phenomenon was defined by Philip Curtin13 as the “gewgaw myth” but the vision it offers of the process of exchange between the parties is actually misunderstood because of a strong Eurocentric perspective. While not the central focus of this text, it is important to mention that the natives had perfectly understood the rivalries between the French and the Portuguese and tried to manipulate them to gain advantage in their own internal conflicts. Recognizing the active role that natives played in the establishment and development of the colonial system is the first step towards highlighting the processes of political resistance, and cultural and cosmological reconfiguration, implied in the deep transformation undergone by their socio-economic structures14. The exchange that Europeans wrongly interpreted as unequal represented for indigenous groups a key element to reinforcing political alliances functional to the social reproduction of their own community. Some of the objects were not traded as goods but given as gifts, initiating a network of reciprocity that further accelerated the movement of material culture around the Atlantic space. Thanks to recent studies, we know that the exchange did not occur if it was considered as unequal15. Indigenous people were not naïve, nor were they incapable of “rationally” grasping the value of things. When approaching this topic, we should rather observe the socio-political dynamics reflected in the process of exchange for it can indeed be a detector of how European objects – and Europeans as an alterity – were appropriated, reinterpreted and included in indigenous cultural systems16.

• 17 Domenici, Davide, Il senso delle cose: materialità ed estetica nell’arte mesoa (...)
• 18 Feest, Christian, “European Collecting of American Indian Artefacts and Art”, Journal of (...)

7After the first pieces started to arrive, more and more objects were demanded, officially entering the globalization process of early modern times17. Among them were natural products such as wood, plants, animals, natural dyes, sugar and spices, metals and also indigenous artifacts: feather capes, weapons, objects made of stone or ceramics, belts, necklaces and other ornaments for the body, musical instruments, hammocks, Mexican mosaics, masks and ceremonial pieces. However, if natural products were usually intended for generic daily consumption, indigenous artifacts mostly ended up joining the circuit of rare, exotic goods greatly desired by the nobility and bourgeoisie for their collections. The purpose of possessing and exhibiting strange and precious objects was to evoke a feeling of wonder in observers. For this reason, the places where these collections were kept were known as Wunderkammern or Cabinets of Curiosity18.

• 19 Stagl, Justin, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550-1800. Chur, Routledge, (...)
• 20 Bujok, Elke, “Ethnographica in early modern Kunstkammern and their perception”, Journal (...)
• 21 Daston and Park, op. cit.
• 22 Pomian, Krzysztof, “The collection: between the visible and invisible”, in Susan M. Pear (...)

8The juxtaposition of the categories of wonder and curiosity is something specific to the 16^th century, since they had been considered as opposites before the Renaissance. While curiosity was denigrated as a vice, an unstable state of mind that should be discouraged because it distracted people from God and His redemption19, wonder “was appreciated as a way of paying tribute to God’s creation”20. This attitude changed between the 16^th and the 17^th centuries, when curiosity was re-evaluated as a condition that would increase the production of knowledge of the world. None of those objects whose creation was triggered by a feeling of curiosity was considered as being in competition with God’s creation but as instruments to gain a certain power over the world21. As the term could refer both to the feeling and to the material object that caused it, it becomes clear in which terms the possess of these objects of curiosity led to the acquisition of political and intellectual prestige22. With regard to the concept of wonder, it had been used as a term of classification since the late Middle Ages. ‘Mirabilia’ were things shrouded in mystery, echoing distant, exotic worlds and considered as the noblest creations of nature. Their existence was motivated by a specific natural, symbolic order that worked according to a cause-effect principle but could be suspended by God’s hand to produce miracles or supernatural events. Their value was partly linked to their scarcity in the European market, partly due to the belief that they were a source of natural, spiritual and magic power that would be absorbed by their owners. The term did not necessarily have a positive connotation as we intend it today, being perhaps closer to our concepts of surprise and astonishment. The objects that entered the collections of the 16^th century Cabinets inherited this status. Also, unlike the previous period, the notion of wonder was now used as a category to produce specific knowledge of the world rather than a way to describe it. Classifying something as ‘mirabilia’ was a way to define it as not usual, not ordinary, and consequently to increase the distance between Europeans and what or whom the object represented. The Other was arbitrarily included in, or excluded from, the different domains of identity and alterity, consequently gaining or losing the right to “cultural particularization”.

• 23 Domenici, op. cit.
• 24 Poulot, Dominique, Museu e Museologia. Belo Horizonte, Autêntica Editora, (...)
• 25 Pagden, Anthony, La caída del hombre natural. El indio americano y los orígene (...)
• 26 Daston and Park, op. cit.
• 27 Shelton, Anthony Alan, “Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the Incor (...)
• 28 Stewart, Susan, On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the (...)
• 29 Mullen Kreamer Christine, “Defining Communities Through Exhibiting and Collect (...)

10Cabinets of Curiosity constituted a most heterogeneous reality and their proliferation led to the creation of a real market for curiosities: collectors commissioned the creation of special pieces from raw materials and exchanged object or sold them to those who wanted to enrich their collections. Unfortunately, the majority of the objects were lost or destroyed over time, innumerable accidents and the scattering of these collections; those that survived are currently part of European ethnographic museums23. The Cabinets of Curiosities are considered to be the ancestors of these institutions because of both ideological and typological assumptions24. As stressed by Pagden25, the ethnographic material served as visual testimony to what was difficult to describe and explain because of to the huge differences that existed between Europe and America. Compared to written and graphic sources, the objects carried within themselves the idea of direct contact with another world26. Also, Wunderkammern collections were considered as real representations of the universe, microcosmos of the known world27. Since it was the first time that the practice of collecting was interpreted as a way of producing an adequate representation of the world through the recontextualization of a decontextualized object into a new system of meanings and values28, it is important not to underestimate their role in the construction of the classification and categorization structure that Europeans used to exert and maintain their domination of the collected Other29 (Figuras 1, 2).

• 30 Anonymous (n.d.), Descrittione dell’India occidentale chiamata il mondo novo, (...)

11The interaction between printed texts and indigenous objects that circulated at different levels of society is made explicit in an anonymous text written probably in the second half of the 16^th century and entitled “Descrittione dell’India occidentale chiamata il mondo novo, donde sotto brevità, Intenderai il modo de gli Idoli loro & del lavorar la terra, cose belle e rare, Raccolte da un sacerdote che di là è venuto & le ha portate seco alcune gentilezze fatte di mano de detti Indiani, suttilissimamente lavorate”. With regard to the objects that were gathered and brought to Europe, the author says that they are “ancient objects worthy of being viewed so that seeing them one believes that which some authors wrote and meant them as accounts”30. Even if the text focused on pieces coming from the Mesoamerican lands, we can easily imagine that this attitude also concerned objects collected among Brazilian indigenous groups. If we compare the few things that have come down to us with the narrative and visual representations contained in accounts such as those of Léry, Thevet, Staden, De Bry and others, it becomes clear that they were complementing one another in the construction of a single set of knowledge of the New World.

• 31 Image available at: https://www.restituzioni.com/opere/mantello-cerimoniale-tupinamb/ (c (...)
• 32 Cecchi, Jacopo Moggi and Stanyon, Roscoe (eds.), Il Museo di Storia Naturale dell’Univer (...)
• 33 Françozo, Mariana C., De Olinda a Holanda: O gabinete de curiosidades de Nassau, Campina (...)
• 34 Gnaccolini, Laura Paola, “Mantello cerimoniale Tupinambá. Scheda Storico artis (...)
• 35 Thevet, André, As singularidades da França Antárctica a que outros chamam (...)

12Objects made with feathers were among the most remarkable and desired. As an example, we can mention feather cloaks. Only eleven of them have survived and they are currently part of the collections of a few ethnographic museums in Europe, among them the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Florence (Figura 3), the National Museum of Denmark (Figura 4) and the Ambrosian Library in Milan31. They were inherited from the Cabinets of Curiosities of the Medici family32, of João Mauricio de Nassau-Siegen, general governor of the Dutch colony in the northeast of Brazil from 1637 until 164433, and of Manfredo Settala, a 16^th century Italian nobleman34. The desirability of these objects was due to their aesthetic beauty as well as to their symbolic importance. The collectors might have got information about them from accounts such as those of André Thevet, who reports the existence of innumerable types of birds, whose feathers were of all kinds and colors, and says that “savages make various kind of ornaments of these feathers, with which they cover themselves when they go to war or slaughter their enemies; some savages use the feathers to make clothes or hats in their own fashion”35. A more detailed description can be found in the account of the German naturalist Georg Markgraf. According to him, the natives:

• 37 Françozo, op. cit.

13His attention to details encourages us to believe that it was the refinement of the technique as well as the exoticism of the materials that aroused interest among Europeans37.

• 38 According to the anthropologist Alfred Métraux, these capes were used during ceremonies (...)

14In written accounts though, the information we have today regarding the use of the cloaks – which we now know was ceremonial38 – among Tupi groups is rather poor. It can be counterbalanced by the graphic descriptions that accompanied the arrival of the objects. In works such as “Tupi Dance” (Figura 5), Theodore de Bry portrays a group of natives who are dancing in a circle, at whose center three people stand out wearing headdresses, belts and cloaks made from feathers, and holding maracas. Another example is the work of Frans Post “A Village in Brazil” painted between 1645 and 1680 (Figura 6). Here, the human presence is part of a wider scene whose composition is typical of landscape painting. The natives are represented in the background as naked people dancing in a circle. Among them, the feather cloaks are recognizable in the red spots that emerge from the brown background.

• 39 In the Castel of Wasserburg-Anholt in the northeast of Germany is preserved a (...)
• 40 Thevet, 1944 [1557], op. cit., p. 197; my translation.

15In general, all feather objects aroused interest and wonder among rich Europeans who sometimes flaunted them during fancy dress parties or on other social occasions39. Their presence was a constant in the accounts of travelers, who referred to this element of indigenous culture with some amazement. Feather crowns are described by Thevet as “high plumes, beautiful and wonderful [which] decorate the head”40, while Staden says that:

• 42 Chicangana-Bayona, Yobenj Aucardo, “Visões de terras, canibais e gentios prodigiosos”, A (...)
• 43 Pozzi, Mario, Il mondo nuovo di Amerigo Vespucci, Milano, Serra e Riva Editori, 1984.
• 44 Chicangana-Bayona, op. cit.

16The way natives used feathers to adorn their bodies confused to Europeans, who perceived the classic figure of the wild man – savage and hairy, half-man, half-animal – simultaneously evoked and contradicted. Feathers, body painting and ornaments, which at a superficial glance looked like fur, rather revealed and enhanced the nudity of natives, in addition generating conflicting ideas about the nature and the origin of these people. At first, nudity without the related feeling of shame was interpreted as a condition of prelapsarian naiveté and purity, and the luxuriant nature of the Brazilian coast recalled the Garden of Eden to many travelers. The overlapping of the two places led to the creation of a complex net of intertwined meanings in the popular imaginary42. As an example of this process, we can mention the xylography done by Johann Froschauer in 1505 (Figura 7) and published with the first illustrated edition of Amerigo Vespucci’s account43. The way the artist represents his subjects does not correspond with Vespucci’s description: indigenous people are not depicted naked but with several ornaments and feather skirts around the hips and covering the genitals. This detail is significant because it shows how, in the attempt to imagine people he had never seen, Froschauer was influenced by previous artistic production, as well as by the association between the Brazilian land and the Garden of Eden. The feather dresses recall those wore by Adam and Eve in visual representations of the Expulsion from Paradise44.

• 45 Carneiro da Cunha, op. cit.
• 46 The domain of Nature was interpreted by 16^th century Europeans as in opposition to the u (...)
• 47 MacCormack, op. cit.
• 48 Gliozzi, op. cit.
• 49 Genesis, 9, 20-27.
• 50 Carneiro da Cunha, op. cit.

17At the same time it was unacceptable to think that South American lands corresponded to the Garden of Eden. According to the Bible – which at the time was still the most authoritative source – all of humanity descended from Adam and Eve and was therefore heir to original sin45. Moreover, the total submission of those populations to an incontrollable nature46, as well as the absence of any form of civilization, legitimized their classification as savages and barbarians. How could they not feel ashamed by such nakedness, then?47 The only possibility that they dated back to a “pre-Adamitic” species (as first impressions of purity, innocence and absence of any religious or divine knowledge had suggested) was abandoned as soon as Europeans interfaced with those aspects of indigenous cultures such as warfare and human sacrifice48. Meanwhile, the most accredited theory was that which identified the natives as the descendants of Cam, the cursed son of Noa. The fact that he had mocked his father’s nudity49 would justify the barbarity, the ignorance of God’s law, and above all the nudity50.

• 51 Gliozzi, op. cit.
• 52 Yaya, Isabel, “Wonders of America. The curiosity cabinet as a site of represen (...)
• 53 Domenici, op. cit.

18This debate was part of a wider context in which the attempt of incorporate indigenous peoples into the Judeo-Christian genealogy and cosmology corresponded to the need to including them in the human species. Indeed, to affirm that Amerindians derived from Europeans legitimized their juridical, political and religious subjection51. In this process too, feather objects played a role. Besides embedding and feeding philosophical and religious speculations, we should not forget that once in Europe they became objects of wonder and curiosity. This means that qualities such as aesthetic beauty and the refinement of technique were interpreted through another category related to the previous ones, that of ingenuity. During the Renaissance, ingenuity referred to an intellectual ability linked to sensitive knowledge and artistic creation, and occupied a fundamental position in the philosophical, aesthetic and rhetorical thought. Those who possessed it were considered able to create cognitive associations through operations of synthesis as well as technically complex works and objects. In other words, it meant being endowed with rational thought that allowing individuals to arise from the ‘state of nature’ into which humanity was born. In indigenous artifacts, the assembling of unusual raw materials was considered a defiance of traditional representation techniques and of “natural creations” themselves52. The technical complexity of the objects was then considered by many – especially by missionaries who wanted to promote the process of evangelization – as a proof of the humanity of indigenous people and the possibility of redeeming them from the wild condition in which they were53. Although imbued with positive intentions, this conceptual device was simply another way of thinking about, and placing indigenous societies in, that superior-inferior/civilized-primitive relationship through which Europeans understood their encounter with the Other. In fact, the exclusion of the natives from the domain of the “monstrous races” and the recognition of some kind of rationality still did not completely humanize them. They were rather considered half-human, morally incomplete, but whose condition of damnation could be redeemed through correct evangelization and civilization.

• 55 Thevet, André, La Cosmographie Universelle, Tome second, Paris, 1575.
• 56 Staden, op. cit., p. 66; my translation.
• 57 Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela and Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, “Vingança e temporalidade: o (...)
• 58 Carneiro da Cunha and Viveiros de Castro, op. cit.
• 59 Voigt, Lisa and Brancaforte, Elio, “The Travelling Illustration of the Sixteen (...)

20In this case too, graphic representations played a major role in spreading a specific imaginary about these objects while at the same time arousing contradictory feelings of wonder, amazement, fear and revulsion. Their use is well documented in works such as that of André Thevet, who depicts them in several illustrations of his “Cosmographie Universelle”55 (Figura 10, 11, 12). In both cases, the men who are holding the weapon are about to use it against enemies or prisoners, as also Staden witnessed during his captivity. According to him the Tupinamba called it ‘Iwera Pemme’. It was a “tool which they used to kill people”56 and with which he believed they would kill him too. The information about the clubs is accurate. They were used in battles as well as in ritual killing by fracturing the skull – which in recent studies has been reconsidered as more important for the finalization of revenge than the consumption of the enemy’s flesh57. During this ritual the prisoner was treated with care and honored with several gifts, his body painted and decorated with feathers. Before the skull was bashed in, several ritual actions were performed, and afterwards the body was cut into pieces, roasted and eaten by the people of the village. The narratives about these episodes suggest that during a ritual sacrifice nothing was left to chance and each action followed a specific set of rules. At the end of the ritual, the warrior in charge of the killing gained prestige and charisma, and was awarded a new name in addition to the one he already had. The more names a warrior had, the greater was the social recognition granted to him. According to Carneiro da Cunha and Viveiros de Castro58 the accomplishment of revenge was interpreted as a rite of passage to adult age; it conferred honor and encouraged the perpetuation of a system in which such action was seen as a symbol of value and dignity. This complex system of meanings and relationships never entered the European imaginary and the objects, by evoking practices such as warfare, human sacrifice and anthropophagy, were used to represent indigenous people only as fierce and uncivilized savages. Europeans developed a kind of obsession with them and yet never really came to understand the conflict/alliance dynamics that their use evoked. The centrality of revenge was the aspect which, more than any other, troubled Europeans and demonstrated the total lack of rationality and morality of natives. The vindictive dynamic is mentioned in the account of Staden, who spent nine months as a captive of the Tupinambá. In his work, published after he returned to Europe, he waxed eloquent about the extremely negative and corrupt image of the natives. There is no trace of curiosity or admiration in his account, only contempt and fear. This perspective is made even clearer in the series of fifty-three incisions that accompanied the first edition, published in Marburg in 155759. On the front cover, under the quite explicit title, we see the representation of a man who is tasting the leg of another individual while comfortably lying in a hammock; next to him other limbs are roasting on a brazier (Figura 13). In the other illustrations the barbarity of the natives is constantly opposed to the image of author, displayed in a position of submission, with his hands joined in prayer and his intimate parts covered with leaves.

• 60 Deák Gloria-Gilda, Discovering America’s Southeast. A Sixteenth Century View Based on th (...)
• 61 Keazor, Henry, “Theodore de Bry's Images of America”, Print Quarterly, 1998, v (...)
• 62 Groeser, Michiel van, The De Bry collection of voyages (1590-1634): editorial (...)
• 63 Deák, op. cit.
• 64 Quoted in Feest, Christian, “Indians and Europe? Editor’s Postscript”, in Chri (...)

21Other famous representations of Amerindian anthropophagy are those by the engraver Theodore de Bry from Liège, who worked in France and Germany in the second half of the 16^th century. Fascinated by the many narratives from the New World, he executed one of the most important works dedicated to indigenous peoples of the known lands: “Le Grand Voyage” and “Le Petit Voyage”, divided into fourteen volumes and published between 1590 and 163660. The section dedicated to the indigenous people of Brazil is part of the volume entitled “India Occidentalis III” and it is almost entirely inspired by the accounts of Staden and Léry. It is known that De Bry was greatly influenced by the models of the time in the depiction of the characters and in the construction of the composition, and that he often imitated the drawings of other artists. Since he had never visited the territories he represented, he had no other choice than to rely on images and descriptions produced by others, often reinterpreting them according to his tastes or to public demand61. Thus, what he shows of Brazilian lands corresponds to those themes and narratives that were most successful among the readers of 16^th century chronicles: ceremonial and ritual scenes, the presence of nature, the theme of the naked body and, of course, the anthropophagic practice. His engravings excelled in detail and composition; however, they do not show anything new, either from the iconographic or from the symbolic points of view. Everything follows the traditional models used to think about a generic exotic other, who is standardized in representations that emphasize barbarity and moral corruption. Characteristics such as nudity, corporal mutilation, bodily decoration with feathers, and actions such as participation in cannibal feasts are exaggerated both in contents and in form; any “guide” to the interpretation of images is made unnecessary by their eloquence in showing socially and culturally unacceptable behaviors62. The structural paradox typical of the gaze that Europeans projected onto the New World persisted in De Bry; in the minds of those who had never been there, it was conceived as a paradise lost, inhabited by individuals who resembled ancient divinities, and who were at the same time noble and primitive63. The characterization of these first engravings was extended without many distinctions to all non-European groups, and traits such as nakedness, naiveté, body painting, the use of colored feather clothes, lust, violence and cannibalism became diacritical features of a primitive and non-modern alterity. William Sturtevant defined this process as Tupinambization64; the knowledge that it produced reinforced the false myths already spread in the European imaginary with new visions that mostly aimed at satisfying public curiosity (Figura 14, 15).

• 65 Appadurai, Arjun (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, (...)
• 66 Kopytoff, Igor, “The cultural biography of things: commodization as a process”, in Arjun (...)

22In the journey of indigenous material culture from the New World to the Old we cannot underestimate the role played by the attribution of different values to such objects. The context presented so far confirms that the value we place on things is never intrinsic but arbitrary, and is conferred according to different criteria of desirability, the possibility of exchange and recognition of some kind of authenticity. The economic dimension is only one of the several ways to measure the value of an object, which can coexist at the same time in different regimes of value and exchange circuits65. While travelling in space and time and leaping from one cultural system to another, objects are constantly appropriated, reinterpreted and recontextualized. The new meanings and identities that are constructed for them should not be considered separately, but as layered on the objects as part of their “biography”66. To explore them and analyze the paths that material culture has traveled allows us to deconstruct the epistemological and ideological categories through which they have been constantly reinvented and to reveal the points of intersection between the collecting practice and colonial politics.

• 67 Thomas, 1991, op. cit.

23Nicholas Thomas67 suggests a perspective that considers the alienability and inalienability of objects, that is to say, their inclusion in, or exclusion from, an economic exchange circuit, as depending on the social circumstances of which they are part. For the Tupi groups, the exchange of objects was constitutive of the relational dimension and regulated the maintenance of social and political balances. For Europeans it was an activity mainly related to the commercial dimension. And yet in both cases the categories with which these objects were interpreted at the moment they were given away were not the same as when they were received. In both cases the objects were absorbed and included in another system, in which value was attributed according to pre-existing categories – for example that of ‘mirabilia’.

• 68 According to Appadurai (1986) the flow of goods is the result of the entanglement of soc (...)
• 69 Kopytoff (1986) distinguishes the processes of commodification and singularization, (...)

24In this way, rifles, blunderbusses, hats, clothes, mirrors, glass stones and all the other objects that natives received from Europeans entered the exchange circuit at the base of Tupi society and promoted rapid circulation of these goods throughout the Brazilian territory. On the contrary, in Europe the appropriation of indigenous objects tended more towards an aesthetic diversion68 that often caused them to join the circuit of luxury goods and of Cabinets of Curiosities, even though this process did not correspond to a complete singularization of the objects69 because they continued to be exchanged in a parallel market in which goods consisted of rarities and curiosities.

• 70 Bujok, op. cit.
• 71 Yaya, op. cit.
• 72 Bujok, op. cit.
• 73 Feest, op. cit.
• 74 Monteiro, John, Tupis, tapuias e historiadores: Estudos de História Indígena e do Indige (...)

25The recognition of an “authentic quality” played a key role in determining the passage of an object from one regime of value to another; it was also fundamental in legitimizing the discourses built around objects in terms of production of identities and alterities. In the 16^th and in the early 17^th centuries it was still the unfamiliarity, the exotism, the aesthetic beauty, relations with literary production and the capacity to arouse curiosity and wonder that defined whether an object was authentic or not and, consequently, whether its representation of the world truthful. Some more than others suffered a process of “revalorization” and “authentication” that turned them into symbols of a specific stereotype of Latin-American indigenous populations. In addition to what I have already reported, a meaningful example is the anonymous painting “The Parade of the ‘Queen America’ at the Court of Stuttgart” (Figura 16) executed in 1599 to celebrate the establishment of a territorial council in the dukedom of Württemberg. Several individuals and courtesans are portrayed as representing the four continents known at the time, especially America: they are wearing feather cloaks, feather headdresses and other decorations for the legs; their bodies are decorated with red paint and they are holding bows, arrows, clubs, Mexican shields, maracas and Mexican feather scepters70. As a result, the objects and their complex meanings are flattened in a non-European exotic dimension, condensed into a single conceptual space in which they have lost any function except that of spectacularizing indigenous cultures and conferring power on the collector. The same attitude emerges from the inventories of the Cabinets of Curiosity. The variety of the collection and the equal conceptualization of such different objects suggest that cabinets were eclectic and quite chaotic places. However, it does not mean that their organization did not follow a specific order. The principles through which things were arranged were different, from the type of raw material to the collection period, to the function, and yet none of them considered their ethnic or geographical origin71. This was clearly a symptom of the lack of interest of collectors, travelers and merchants in actually knowing something about the culture that produced artifacts. Objects that were labelled as “Indian” could come either from the “West Indies”, namely America, and the “East Indies”, namely Asia, making the distinction rather difficult. This “confusion” demonstrated how the idea of foreignness was perceived in a quite generalized way, which ignored any kind of local specificity72, an aspect which had great influence on how this exotic “Indian” was conceptualized, and on how the term itself became synonymous of a homogenous whole rather than a heterogeneous reality made up of different groups, each with its own cultural specificities73. Aimoré, Tabajara, Tupinambá, Carijó, Kariri, Potiguara, just to mention a few indigenous groups, did not exist in the European mind. The only distinction made was the opposition between tame groups and fierce ones. While the former were considered as having the capacity to reach a “proper” level of social organization and civilization, the latter were seen as savages and inferior sub-humans, lacking any social, political or moral standards74. In the European philosophical debate, the polarization of these two models resulted in the creation of the famous dichotomy of the good savage and the cannibal. The good savage corresponded to the extreme idealization and relativization of indigenous societies living in an idyllic relationship with an uncontaminated nature. From this perspective, they were “ideal men” completely immersed in a morally unaffected “state of nature” that only the processes of civilization and domination of the natural world could corrupt. They were like children whose savagery was justified by their ignorance of “modernity”. At the same time, they had to be civilized or they could never ascend the “evolutionary pyramid” that Europeans believed defined the path of human beings through history. In this last case, they remained stuck at the opposite pole, that of the cannibal and brute devoid of rationality, morality and, consequently, humanity.

• 75 Langfur, op. cit.
• 76 Lindo, op. cit.

26As Langfur75 underlines, none of the several accounts, illustrations or representations supporting one or the other position was capable of understanding and explaining the complexity of the role that indigenous peoples played once they entered the colonial system. The categories constructed to identify these groups tended to stress the distance in terms of European superiority-indigenous inferiority without really describing their social, cultural or political features. The native remained an inferior being, to be educated or to enslaved (and eliminated)76.

• 77 Morelli, Federica, Il mondo atlantico, Roma, Carocci, 2018.
• 78 Wagner, Roy, The Invention of Culture, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Pre (...)
• 79 Karp, Ivan, “How Museums Define Other Cultures”, American Art, 1991, vol. 5-1/ (...)

27To conclude, I hope this paper has demonstrated that the circulation of Amerindian objects in Europe was not only the result of the encounter between deeply different realities but also contributed in their conceptual formation. As for written accounts and graphic representations, material culture turned out to be an instrument for inventing the Other in order to include it in the cognitive horizon of European cultural systems. At the same time, Europeans began to “discover” and reinvent themselves as a collectivity endowed with a shared identity compared with the absolute alterity that America represented77. By “invention” we mean here what Roy Wagner78 defined as the interpretation of concepts and elements proper to an other culture through categories which are familiar to the mind of the observer. As Karp also states, in the production and transmission of an image of the Other, “the familiar becomes the bridge through which we understand the exotic”79, while at the same time it implies the projection of one’s categories onto this otherness. Thus the differences from, and similarities to, what is familiar are not just the bases for the interpretation and the representation of the Other, but they also render explicit the reference points within which it is invented. In this context, knowledge of indigenous people acquired through their objects is far more representative of the early modern European mentality, its ideologies, ambitions and contradictions, than of the groups it claims to describe. Over the centuries, the naturalization of this invention in the global imaginary has inevitably meant the normalization of the European perspective about the Other. Not only did it influence the public opinion but it also resulted in the production of an exclusion-inclusion dynamic which was most important in the imposition of indigenist politics.