De trofeo de guerra a icone del indianismo: La doble trayectoria de un niño Bororo en el Imperio de Brasil, siglo XIX

Taken from indigenous communities and isolated from their everyday uses and rituals, ethnographic collections tend to be mistakenly transformed into crystalline and abstracts expressions of indigenous cultures, frozen by a process in which creativity and reflexivity are not represented. This analysis of the portrait of a young Indian Bororo (indigenous people of Mato Grosso, Brazil), made in the late nineteenth century and is now in the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, allows us to show an alternative approach, practicing a radical historicization about forces and motivations surrounding the portrait. As we follow the social networks why the portrait came to be offered, accepted, classified and incorporated into the patrimony of MN we get to reveal forgotten and silenced stories, as well as concrete practices in relation to indigenous in the Empire of Brazil (1839-1889)and also the ideological limits of romantic and nationalist representations (the «Indianismo»). On the paths of the adoption by a wealthy and aristocratic family, an Indian child, who at first is but a war trophy, tells to his step mother his native name (Piududo, or «Humming-bird »), is turned into an indian artist, imagined as a young gentleman (paguemeguera), to get at the end to purely exemplify the indianist narrative on the tragic trajectory of indian people and its impossibility to incorporate in the Brazilian society.