O Eldorado e a busca de tesouros como práticas contra a cultura material autóctone. Estudo comparativo entre Peru e Brasil (1838-1850)

Abstract

This work studies the permanence of colonial practices in the nineteenth century from the relationship between the myth of Eldorado, the autochthonous materiality and the nation state in the specific cases of Peru and Brazil. It is proposed that the expeditions, the search for "treasures" and their appropriation are articulated as a body of agencies oriented against autochthonous materiality, which are also linked to some degree with the myth of Eldorado. Such practices functioned as devices aimed at legitimizing modern national projects, anchored in Occidental epistemology, which are translated into concepts such as progress, science and civilization. In this process, the imposition of these concepts on the autochthonous materiality causes the epistemology that gave rise to it to be denatured, as well as the creation of new nomenclatures through the legal, museological and scientific state apparatus. Thus, the research shows a different treatment carried out by each nation state – Peruvian and Brazilian – and this happens because of the differences that both have. On the part of the Peruvian State, we have that the abundance of materiality has given the possibility of establishing a constant and structured collection in the same state institutions, permeating all the social groups that have been influenced by these ideas. On the part of the Brazilian State, materiality was not found in these proportions, according to the information recorded in the IHGB publications, and to balance these disproportions that they thought they had, they paid greater attention to the myth of Eldorado, becoming a national project, a dynamic that in Peru – during the nineteenth century – was present, but not as a central element for the national State. All these explanations help to understand that the estate overcomes a question of physical dispossession of materiality, to be an attack against autochthonous epistemology, reaffirming colonialism in these nascent national states and with it the maintenance of strategies to deny the realization of activities that confirm the humanity of the autochthonous subject from their own worldviews.