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Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology v10n1 | 2013 Cultural Heritage and Museums Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/vibrant/230 ISSN: 1809-4341 Publisher Associação Brasileira de Antropologia Electronic reference Vibrant, v10n1 | 2013, « Cultural Heritage and Museums » [Online], Online since 11 October 2013, connection on 28 March 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/vibrant/230 This text was automatically generated on 28 March 2020. Vibrant is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Articles What's in a copy? Gustavo Lins Ribeiro Networks of desire The specter of AIDS and the use of digitak media in the quest for secret same-secret relations in São Paulo Richard Miskolci Dossier: Cultural heritage and museums Foreword Antonio A. Arantes and Antonio Motta Part 1: The 1980s agenda in Brazil Reflections on culture, heritage and preservation Eunice Ribeiro Durham On the crossroads of preservation Revitalizing São Miguel chapel in a working class district of São Paulo Antonio A. Arantes Building senses of "community" Social memory, popular movements and political participation Ruth Cardoso Anthropology and cultural heritage Gilberto Velho Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká Casa Branca Temple Part 2: Heritage, memory and the city Counter-uses of the city and gentrification Consuming heritage Rogerio Proença Leite The dark side of the moon Heritage, memory and place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil José Reginaldo Santos Gonçalves Black heritage and the revitalization of Rio de Janeiro's Port Zone Urban interventions, memories and conflicts Roberta Sampaio Guimarães Vibrant, v10n1 | 2013 2 Anthropology between heritage and museums José Guilherme Cantor Magnani The city museum of São Paulo: a new design for city museums in the era of the megacity Maria Ignez Mantovani Franco Part 3: Otherness Magic and power in ethnographic collections Sorcery objects under institutional tutelage Ulisses N. Rafael and Yvonne Maggie Heritage.org /digital museum of african and Afro-Brazilian memory Challenges to digital patrimonialization Livio Sansone The indians of the Lower Oiapoque and their museum Kuahí The Indians of the Lower Oiapoque and their museum Lux Vidal The peoples of oiapoque and the Kuahí Museum Regina Abreu Anthropology in the museum reflections on the curatorship of the Xikrin Collection Fabíola A. Silva and Cesar Gordon Visible art, invisible artists? The incorporation of aboriginal objects and knowledge in Australian museums Ilana Seltzer Goldstein Part 4: Safeguarding the intangible Heritage, knowledge and (a)symmetries on the Uaupés river Origin narratives, transformation routes Geraldo Andrello Film directed by Vincent Carelli2006, 48 min Iauaretê, Cachoeira das Onças [Jaguar Waterfalls] Vincent Carelli The recognition of Brazilian samba de roda and reunion maloya as intangible cultural heritage of humanity Guillaume Samson and Carlos Sandroni The Reference Center for Brazilian Football Within the dialog between anthropology and museums Clara de Assunção Azevedo and Daniela do Amaral Alfonsi CRBF - Centro de Referência do Futebol Brasileiro [Brazilian Football Reference Center] Aira Bonfim and Danilo Delfino Vibrant, v10n1 | 2013 3 Book Reviews Edmundo Pereira. Um povo sábio, um povo aconselhado - Ritual e política entre os Huitoto-Murui Pedro Musalem Nazar Gilberto Velho. Um Antropólogo na Cidade: Ensaios de Antropologia Urbana Howard S. Becker Vibrant, v10n1 | 2013 4 Articles Vibrant, v10n1 | 2013 5 What's in a copy? Gustavo Lins Ribeiro EDITOR'S NOTE Received March 9, 2013, approved 16 April, 2013 Keynote speech of the congress of German speaking anthropologists, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, September 14, 2011. I thank my colleagues in Austria, especially Andre Gingrich, for such an honor. Copying makes us what we are. Our bodies take shape from the transcription of protein templates, our languages from the mimicry of privileged sounds, our crafts from the repetition of prototypes.Cultures cohere in the faithful transmission of rituals and rules of conduct. To copy cell for cell, word for word, image for image, is to make the known world our own (Hillel Schwartz, 1998: 211). 1 In academic life, it is rather common to start with an issue that one supposes to be familiar with only to find out - after successive approximations - an enormous and intriguing complexity that needs to be further explored. This is, once more, the case. I first thought of writing about copies as an opportunity to present my latest findings concerning the extensive economic reality that is hidden behind "piracy." 2 I entered this fascinating world in the late 1990's by making a simple question while looking at the Made in China goods sold by hawkers in downtown Brasilia and in a crowded street market called the Paraguayan Fair: how did these things got there? I then started research that has lasted for more than ten years. I ended up coining the notions of "economic globalization from below" and of "non-hegemonic world system." While I will present my ideas about them here, I will also explore new issues that arise from another question - what's in a copy? Vibrant, v10n1 | 2013 6 3 A few initial considerations are in order. The English word copy comes from the Latin word "copia" the meaning of which, "abundance, plenty, multitude" (Boon, 2010: 41), already insinuates a vast semantic universe. The world has always been full of copies. The Industrial Revolution accelerated the multiplication of objects and images while the Digital Era made copying easier, more perfect and ubiquitous. Copies always imply several tensions: between essence and appearance; the particular and the universal; the unique and the many; the original and the replica; the authentic and the fake/spurious; between sameness and difference; production and reproduction; homogeneity and heterogeneity; creativity and commerce. 4 What's in a copy? At this point, I could well answer this question with a simple "everything." Indeed, according to Canadian philosopher Marcus Boon, in his thought provoking book "In Praise of Copying," copying "rather than being an aberration or a mistake or a crime, is a fundamental condition or requirement for anything, human or not" (2010: 3). Succumbing to the temptation of answering "everything" would certainly grant me the world record of the shortest article ever, but the answer's astonishing generalization would amount simply to avoid facing the subject's complexity. Therefore, I will answer this question by considering three related dimensions: the importance of copies in academia; in cultural life; and in the economic world. Of course, it goes without saying that these dimensions are not mutually exclusive. Copying and academia 5 It is impossible to think of a university without copies since it is a place for the production, re-production, storage, exhibition and reverence of knowledge. We find copies everywhere: in the libraries or in the copy shops, in the up-loaded PDF files of scanned texts or in the term papers downloaded from virtual firms that may even write customized monographs for their clients. Copying is also at the center of the classrooms, at the heart of pedagogy and learning, not only because professors repeat other authors' works while teaching but also because students are supposed to show they understood them by copying and reproducing their thoughts. Furthermore, isn't the academic ethos itself heavily based on admiration and on the mimicry of certain role models sometimes displayed and incorporated in theories sometimes in behavioral and political styles? 6 At the university, the contradictions between copying and originality abound. At the same time that copyrights are praised by many as a modern right, they are constantly disrespected in the name of education. At the same time that students need to know and copy other people's work, they are supposed to add something new. At the same time that they admire and often emulate their mentors, they are supposed to make original contributions to knowledge. Originality here means aggregated difference. Perhaps, in the pragmatics of the academic world, we are, most often unconsciously, accepting the fact that there isn't such a thing as 100 per cent originality and that there is never a perfect copy, that copying always means adding something different, a fact that is especially clear in art history (Boon 2010). In the end, creation and innovation signify an addition to previously known things or processes resulting from copying exercises and from the imperfections of memory and reproduction. But, since in academia we need to be authors, the tendency, as in other spheres, is to abhor copies Vibrant, v10n1 | 2013 7 and praise originality, something made clear by expressions such as "my own theory is" and "in my view". 7 In academic life, nowhere is the scorn for copying greater than when the issue is plagiarism, a problem that has consistently grown since "paste and cut" became popular jargon. Paste and cut make the pedagogical role of copying problematic. One thing is a handwritten copy of a published text, another is its digital copy. A handwritten copy demands a time for reflection, for becoming acquainted with an author's ideas, for thinking of how to appropriate and criticize interpretations. The digital copy is an almost instantaneous action in which the contents of what is being copied may be completely unknown. I am not so much interested in the ethical problems triggered by plagiarism and forgery which most of the time are related to moral and professional deceptions and/or frustrated economic interests. What interests me is the idea that the current spreading of plagiarism is embedded in major changes in the technologies of teaching, publishing, reproducing and using information that are having an impact on traditional working routines in the academic milieu in ways that are still difficult to understand but that will certainly generate radically different scenarios and practices. According to Hillel Schwartz Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism have been accused of plagiarizing definitions.