Cultura material Karajá

A cultura material karajá envolve técnicas de construção de casas, tecelagem de algodão, adornos plumários, artefatos de palha, madeira, minerais, concha, cabaça, córtex de árvores e cerâmica. Introdução por <b>Claudia Augustat & Cássio de Figueiredo</b>

The <i><a href="http://www.weltmuseumwien.at/">Weltmuseum Wien</a></i>, Vienna's museum of ethnology, is the custodian of around 600 Karajá objects. The selection shown on the Povos Indígenas no Brasil website comes mainly from the collections of Franz Steindachner and Mario Baldi.
The collection of Austrian zoologist Franz Steindachner (1834-1919), a former director of the Imperial & Royal Natural History Museum in Vienna, contains around 150 ethnographic and archaeological items from South America.
The <a href="http://pib.socioambiental.org/en/povo/karaja">Karajá</a> items represented in the Steindachner collection form part of a purchase he made in 1903 of 137 ethnographic and archaeological items which had been collected by seringueiros. The purchase was made from a representative of a rubber company named Roux (Augustat & Feest 2014) during a visit Steindachner made to Ilha das Onças, in Pará, with Emilio Goeldi. The objects were from the states of Bahia, Maranhão, Pará, and Goiás.
Attempts to identify the so-called Roux company have so far been unsuccessful. One possibility is that roux is a misspelling of rouge, a mistake which would have been made by Steindachner himself. In that case, it is likely that the seller of the collection was someone in charge of procuring rubber in Brazil for the Rouge River plant of the Ford Motor Company. Another possibility is that roux would refer to a manufacturer of rubber pistons used in syringes of the roux type. Either way, the association of the collection bought by Steindachner with the rubber period is undeniable.
The fact that the Steindachner collection was purchased and not collected by himself makes it difficult to say when these objects were actually in use, but is likely that they date from around the second half of the 19th Century, when <a href="http://pib.socioambiental.org/en/povo/karaja/368">continuous contact of the Karajá with the Brazilian society</a> had already been happening for many decades.
Mario Baldi (1896-1957) was an Austro-Brazilian photographer and photojournalist who dedicated his life to the Brazilian hinterland. He immigrated to Brazil in 1921, where he established his residence in Teresópolis (Lopes & Feest, 2009). The Mario Baldi Collection contains 386 ethnographic items - mostly Karajá, some <a href="http://pib.socioambiental.org/en/povo/kayapo">Kayapó</a>, and a few <a href="http://pib.socioambiental.org/en/povo/tapirape">Tapirapé</a> - and around 10,000 photographs, including several hundred relating to indigenous peoples (Augustat & Feest, 2014).
From the 1930s to the 1950s Baldi photographed, filmed, and collected among the <a href="http://pib.socioambiental.org/en/povo/bororo">Bororo</a>, Karajá, <a href="http://pib.socioambiental.org/en/povo/xavante">Xavante</a>, and Tapirapé. In 1934 he produced a movie about the Salesians’ religious mission amongst the Bororo in Mato Grosso (Lopes & Feest, 2009). In 1936 Baldi made a trip to the Araguaia region with Dom Pedro de Alcântara of Orléans-Braganza, Prince of Grão-Pará, as a private secretary to the prince.
Etta Becker-Donner, the former curator of the South American Collection in Vienna, met Mario Baldi during her visits to Brazil in the 1950s. After Baldi’s death, his collection was received by the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna (Augustat & Feest, 2014).
The remainder of the selection of Karajá objects shown here comes from several other collections such as that of Johan Georg Schwarz, a diplomat who died in 1867 bequeathing his collection to the Imperial & Royal Natural History Museum in Vienna; the Museu Paulista do Estado de São Paulo collection, which results from an exchange made with the museum in Vienna in 1907; the Joseph Gustav Fötterle and Baroness of Loreto collections, dating mainly from the 1880s and purchased in 1906; the collection of José Hofbauer which was acquired in 1912; the collection of Alexander Otto, a former Austrian diplomat who gifted part of his 1950s collection to the Museum für Völkerkunde and finally the Renata Leroux 1990s collection, which was acquired in 1992 by this museum.