The Amulet of Forgetting

Mediapart, 2022

Saskia Cousin, Sara Tassi and Amandine Yéhouêtomé have been working together in Benin for several years. After investigations conducted in the capital Porto-Novo, they are currently interested in the heritage conserved in Western museums. In this text, they reveal the story of the abduction of the Amazons' amulets in 1890 and restore the stories and knowledge kept by the descendants of the women from whom they were stolen.

Arts & cultures, 2019

American Anthropologist, 2006

The Archaeological Encounter: Anthropological Perspectives, 2011

This paper is an analysis of the ways in which the Trio, a central Guianese Carib people who live in the border area of Suriname, French Guiana and Brazil, relate to the eclectic collection of objects they accumulate in their houses. The study of the house in Amazonia has previously been characterized by a particular attention to traditional dwelling places, their decorative value and symbolic powers, and the intricate relationship between kinship, community and settlement. In recent years, some authors interested in the integration of recent historical change to native Amazonia have addressed issues raised by the remapping of settlements, sedentarization and indigenous conversion to Christianity. My approach in this paper lies somewhere in between, as it offers an analysis of relational permanence in new indigenous architectural forms. I am looking at the novelty of ‘old’ houses and their use as display cases of personal histories as an illustration of a series of transformations experienced by the Trio in recent decades, some of which they claim to have actively sought. Ultimately I wish to demonstrate that the house and its artefacts on display constitute literal extensions of their owner’s body, and that this is particularly true in a native Amazonian cosmology which considers persons as composites of affects and capacities fabricated by careful engagement with distant alterity.

This article addresses the history of the royal museum in Abomey, capital of the Dahomey kingdom in the Republic of Benin.

Subjectivity, Creativity, and the Institution, 2009

The Zápara Indians in the Upper Amazon are on the verge of disappearing from the linguistic map. In this paper, I argue that the Zápara dreamers reconstruct the collective memory through their subjective dream experiences. I will explore how a few experienced dreamers are able to journey by dream to a “memory house”, where they can record their own memory or knowledge for the next generations, and receive the ancestors’ knowledge. Moreover, when Manari, one of the young leaders, came to the Quai Branly Museum (Paris, France) to discover the Zápara reserve collection, he provided an original example of the reacquisition of knowledge through conserved artefacts. Thanks to those unusual examples, I will show how the Zapara succeed in being recognized as a living and original people, facing new situations. The dream, as a tool for engaging in the return to the past, provides the historical elements that the Indians then re-inject into their present in order to construct new “traditions”.

2010

In the last century, the objects of Candomblé, a religion of African origin in Bahia, suffered radical transformations in their public value. After discussing in general terms the life of ‘saint’ stones (otã) in Candomblé, this article then focuses on the traces of the life history of one of these otã. This stone was seized in a police raid in a Candomblé house, and then displayed in a museum, until a legal action recently undertaken by political activists obliged the museum to withdraw the stone from exhibition. In the conclusion, I propose to recognize notions of historicity and materiality as keys to understanding the life and ‘agency’ of this and other objects.

The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood, Fernando Santos-Granero (ed.). Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 128-151., 2009

Anthropological Quarterly, 1997