ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses curatorial methodologies focused on promoting reconnections between communities of origin and ethnographic museum collections. The first section examines the problem of understanding things in non-Western societies, with a particular focus on the Amazonian contributions to this subject and the challenges of cross-cultural, curatorial, collaborative projects. The following sections present four methodological approaches for such projects conducted by the authors with partners from the Upper Rio Negro region of the Brazilian and Colombian Amazonia since 2011: (1) the engagement with historical collections, (2) the production of new artefacts as a learning-with-things process, (3) the (re-)making of powerful socio-cosmological relations through things, and (4) the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary collaborations. The closing section argues that via these approaches, the projects discussed incorporated Amazonian Indigenous practices, such as mutuality and reciprocity, into their methods, shifting their goals from representing indigenous ideas about things to engaging with the network of life into which things are inserted.
