In 2021, the important Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta was interviewed within the scope of the Oral History project "Memory of Social Sciences in Brazil.” The interview also led to his donating his personal archive to FGV CPDOC, an important archival institution in Brazil, home to more than 200 personal archives. DaMatta’s collection included, among other items, more than a thousand photographs taken during his seasons of ethnographic research among the Apinajé indigenous people in the 1960s, which led to his doctoral thesis at Harvard University. The photos record people, places, and rituals of the Apinajé people, constituting precious archival documentation about these people. There are also dozens of recordings on cassette tapes and one Super-8 film.
An unavoidable difficulty arose from organizing the audiovisual material on the Apinajé. First, the description would invariably be generic since there is no record of the names of the indigenous people in the material. Indigenous peoples, therefore, would have their identities ignored in the identification process and subsequent public availability of these images. To face this difficulty, we had the initiative to request the collaboration of the Apinajé in identifying and organizing the photos. After the first contact, it became evident that more than the simple identification of individuals in the images, the work could encompass the explanation of a rich social and cultural context. In this way, an attempt was made to establish an in-depth collaborative archival work that would imply the organization and constitution of a historical-cultural heritage of great importance for the Apinajé. The project “INDIGENOUS DOCUMENTAL HERITAGE: COLLABORATIVE WORK BETWEEN FGV CPDOC AND THE APINAJÉ PEOPLE” was then formalized and began in 2023.
