Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative

Neil Safier's current research examines the history of Amazonian ancestors/artefacts/objects in European and American museum collections. As such, it engages explicitly with the knowledge-worlds of Indigenous communities in and across all Amazonian polities, past and present, and seeks to interrogate human and more-than-human worlds to reconstruct an environmental history of the Amazon basin that is congruent with those worlds and their epistemologies. Instead of treating artefacts as passive vestiges of scientific encounters, or Indigenous knowledge as merely a supplementary context for European archives, this project takes material objects, ecological transformations, and Indigenous epistemologies and attempts to locate a model methodology for resolving conflictive or conflicting interpretations of such multi-vocal cultural products and their historical legacies. By following Amazonian artefacts through time and space – from their fabrication within clearly articulated Indigenous cosmologies through to the different institutional contexts they experienced in their circulation, reclassification, and conservation within European and American museums – this project argues that European science was not only shaped by interactions with tropical nature, including its human and more-than-human components, but rather was epistemically and materially co-produced by them. As such, the project aims to develop an artefactual and environmental approach to the history of the Amazonian region – and its Indigenous communities – that connects early modern practices of collecting and avant-la-lettre anthropology with contemporary debates related to heritage, extractivism, and planetary futures.