This article self-reflexively explores the doings of museums (Schorch 2023)—a particular set of knowledge practices that highlight the potential of ethnographic collections for interdisciplinary research and cross-cultural collaboration. It challenges the often rigid classification of objects into the disciplinary categories of ethnography and natural history, and the epistemological divide between nature and culture. Taking an Amazonian feathered headdress as a lens, and comparatively examining its materiality, provenance, use, and multiple meanings, this article reconceptualizes human–environmental relations and demonstrates the value of museum collections as repositories of environmental knowledge situated within particular cultural practices and ontologies.
My focus is a distinctive style of feathered headdress1 originating from the Munduruku2 people in the Brazilian Amazon in the mid-nineteenth century (figure 1). Its remarkable composition and transformative potential emerged during research for an interdisciplinary exhibition COLOUR: Art, Science & Power at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), University of Cambridge (26 July 2022–23 April 2023). Exhibition-making is a specialist form of collaborative practice and knowledge production, which often prompts fresh ways of looking and understanding through the potency of curatorial techniques of assemblage and juxtaposition.
Munduruku feathered headdress. Rio Cadereyta, Brazil, c.1850. Ht. 53cm. Courtesy of Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, E 1903.442.
Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120108
COLOUR integrated insights from anthropology, the arts, humanities, and sciences, drawing on the diverse collections of the eight University of Cambridge museums (Herle 2022). As lead curator, it was a tremendous privilege for me to be able to explore, discover, and select from an amazing range of objects and scientific specimens, and benefit from the specialist knowledge of academic and Indigenous colleagues and the insights of student and community groups. Bringing together knowledge and materials from various disciplines enabled new ways of thinking about color and the objects that were selected for display. As I worked on the exhibition, I found myself drawn to particular colored substances and was at times astonished at the wide range of ways by which different colors are produced.
The aim of the exhibition was to invite visitors to co-investigate ways that color is perceived, experienced, and given meanings in different times and places. There is a longstanding metaphysical debate as to whether color actually exists as an objective property of things or is only in the mind. The perception of color is scientifically understood as the result of the brain's interpretation of different light wavelengths. Yet colors are also material substances that we experience and interact with in our daily lives. Color is closely entwined with our emotions and perception of the world. It has the power to enchant and transform people and things.
Something that repeatedly struck me while researching objects for display was the extraordinary human desire for color. Over millennia people have put enormous effort into producing and obtaining particular colors that often traveled great distances along the trade routes of empire and commerce. Color has been laboriously extracted from the earth, plants, and animals, squeezed from the glands of mollusks and, from the 1850s, produced from coal tar. The processes involved are often surprising, highly skilled, and sometimes dangerous. Within the exhibition, an exploration of the materiality and desire for particular colors included the rich ultramarine blue extracted from lapis lazuli, the brilliant cochineal red derived from the bodies of scale insects, and the sumptuous Tyrian purple extracted from murex snails. Within this context, collections research on MAA's Amazonian featherwork prompted new and surprising ways of conceptualizing the transformative potential of color and the intertwined relations between artifacts and natural history specimens.
Indigenous peoples from the Amazon are renowned for their use of brilliantly colored feathers to create a wide variety of elaborate ornaments and body decorations. My initial assumption that feathered ornaments were examples of the creative use of naturally colored materials in culturally specific ways did not acknowledge the complexity of the Munduruku headdress—the interwoven relations between parrots and humans, nature and culture that became evident after a close investigation of its composition and use. MAA cares for approximately 100 Amazonian feather ornaments, many of which are visually impressive but have limited associated documentation. I was keen to include an example in the COLOUR exhibition and sought specialist advice from anthropologist and Amazonist Stephen Hugh-Jones. He alerted me to the extraordinary and apparently little-known practice of tapirage,3 which is used by various Amazonian groups to change the color of feathers on living parrots. Remarkably, the golden red feathers on the cap of the Munduruku headdress do not display the original color of the species of parrot from which they came, probably Amazona aestiva, whose natural habitat is eastern Brazil. In the wild, the bird's feathers would have been green. The process of tapirage typically involves plucking some of the green or blue feathers from a domesticated parrot and anointing the raw skin with a solution that includes the milky secretion of the monkey frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor). When the feathers grow back, they are golden, sometimes with streaks of red (see below). Two ornithologists from the University Museum of Zoology came to MAA to examine the headdress and confirmed that parrot feathers were used on the cap, but they were astonished by the unusual coloration, which they had never seen before. The physical transformation of the feathers was highlighted in the COLOUR exhibition, by the juxtaposition of the Munduruku headdress with a parrot skin of the turquoise-fronted Amazon, Amazona aestiva, with natural green-colored feathers.
Thinking through the Munduruku headdress and the process of tapirage provided a means to explore the theme of color and this remarkable Indigenous transformational practice, and opened up fertile areas for collaborative multidisciplinary investigation. Preliminary research provided a direct visual link to the first illustration of exactly the same type of headdress collected during a foundational scientific expedition to Brazil by Bavarian naturalists Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius between 1817 and 1820 (Spix and Martius 1823–1831) (figure 2) and thereby provided a direct connection to the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich.4 Comparative research on the materiality, composition, and provenance of the two headdresses demonstrates a close interrelationship between natural history and ethnography in the collection of scientific specimens and Indigenous artifacts. An investigation of historic sources and more recent anthropological accounts of the Amazonian practice of tapirage reveals the multiple transformations between humans and parrots that are imbedded in this amazing headdress. It highlights the contingency of the distinction between knowledge of nature and of humans often assumed in earlier European reports and in many received dispositions of museum collections, where institutional distinctions between natural history and ethnography have played such distinctive roles (Fowler 2003; Livne 2016). The Munduruku headdress is inherently a cross-disciplinary object. As with other artifacts in museum collections, it is a repository of environmental and cultural knowledge based on distinctive ontologies, which can be reactivated by close examination and collaboration with Indigenous knowledge holders.
Depiction of different cultural groups in Brazil, with a focus on body decoration. The figure in the bottom center is wearing a distinctive Munduruku headdress. Zur Reise in Brasilien von Dr Spix and Dr Martius Atlas, 1831: Plate 35. Courtesy of Museum Fünf Kontinente München, photo: Nicolai Kästner 4413/32.
Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120108
The Materiality of the Munduruku Headdress
A close comparative investigation of the two headdresses, at MAA and Museum Fünf Kontinente respectively, revealed a notable consistency in materials and methods of production as well as style (figures 1 and 3). The feathers are supported by a sturdy inner cap made of Indigenous grown and spun cotton tightly woven in a spiral pattern from the center. On this firm yet flexible foundation hundreds of individual parrot feathers are inserted into the top of the cotton fibers. The tips of the feathers are bent over and secured with thin strands of fibrous material (possibly palm fiber). In some places the point of attachment is reinforced with tiny drops of black tree resin. The attachments are finely done and invisible from the inside. The tapirage feathers on the outer cap create a burst of color with yellow feathers streaked with red. The example in Munich also includes a few blue parrot feathers, which are probably naturally produced, creating a more varied coloration that is consistent with the illustration in figure 2.
Front and back of the Munduruku feathered headdress collected by Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich Phillip von Martius, Brazil 1817–1820. Courtesy of Museum Fünf Kontinente München, photograph: Nicolai Kästner 260.
Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120108
The four red tassels hanging from the sides of the headdress are composed of smaller feathers probably taken from the breast of a parrot and tipped with black curassow feathers with a slight blue iridescence. These smaller feathers are attached in tiny bundles to a twisted cotton cord and secured with fibrous binding reinforced by tree resin or possibly beeswax. Hanging from the back of the cap is a row of much larger feathers, alternating between scarlet macaw and blue and yellow macaw, tipped with a fringe of black curassow feathers. The end of each macaw feather is carefully bent over the rim of the inner cap and bound with strands of fibrous material. The macaw feathers are also joined to each other horizontally by a fibrous string. The main difference between the two headdresses is that the example in Munich has a single row of 12 macaw feathers, while the one at MAA has two rows of macaw feathers (16 on top and 17 on the bottom) with the feathers on the upper row neatly trimmed so they hang approximately half way down the feathers below. Importantly, both headdresses clearly show use, with traces of pigment from body paint on the inside rim of the cap. Overall these apparently fragile creations are remarkably robust and in very good condition. The remarkable similarities between the two headdresses and the skill embodied in their construction suggest specialist makers and the likelihood that they come from the same Munduruku group. The materials and methods of construction are of particular interest to Indigenous makers such as Glicéria (Célia) Tupinambá, a Tupi artist and activist, who typically examine museum objects in minute detail (see conclusion).
The Munduruku headdress is a unique type within the extensive Spix and Martius ethnographic collections of nearly five hundred objects, which include over 150 examples of Amazonian featherwork from throughout the region (see Herzog-Schröder, this volume). Collected 25 years after the pacification of the Munduruku, the material in the Spix and Martius collection is one of the oldest and best known of its kind (Zerries 1980: 185).5
Spix, Martius, and Tapirage
Europeans have been aware of the practice of tapirage since the mid-sixteenth century, shortly after the Portuguese first arrived in Brazil. Its geographical distribution is uneven, and reports of its practice extend well beyond specific peoples of the Amazon basin. In the eighteenth century, this extraordinary process was mentioned in numerous published accounts by European explorers and naturalists (for an overview, see Métraux 1944: 252–254, Vimpère 2012: 53–65). It was recorded by Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1749–1804), the great French naturalist, in his book Natural History: General and Particular, which includes the first colored illustration by a European naturalist of a parrot whose feathers were turning from green to yellow (1766 Vol 6, plate 11). The French explorer of the Amazon, Charles de La Condamine, mentioned the practice in 1788 and Francisco Javier Eder, Jesuit missionary in Peru, described the process in 1791. The practice of tapirage was briefly mentioned by the eminent German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in his 1816 travel account of his pioneering expedition to South America (1799–1804), although the brevity of his description suggests he may not have seen it himself. Parrots undergoing this remarkable transformation are still found in a few early ornithological collections. The surprise discovery of two parrots with unusual plumage (Vimpére 2012: plate 1) during the 1998 restoration of the ornithological collection of the naturalist Charles Payraudeau (1798–1865) in the municipal collection of La Chaize-le-Vicomte, prompted Jean Vimpére to investigate the history and distribution of the practice of tapirage. His survey of 54 French museums indicated that only two had parrot specimens displaying tapirage—two at the Natural History Museum in Paris and one in the Natural History Museum in Nantes (2012: 66). While the Bavarian State Museum for Zoology in Munich has numerous specimens collected by Spix in Brazil, including birds, there are no known ornithological examples of tapirage.
The description of tapirage in the account of Spix and Martius is of particular significance (1823–1831, Vol 3: 1312). It is accompanied by a colored illustration including a careful rendition of a Munduruku man wearing the distinctive headdress (1823–1831, Atlas: plate 35) (figure 2). In 1817, Spix and Martius were sent to Brazil by Maximilian I Joseph King of Bavaria. Their work was inspired by Alexander von Humboldt's romantic and spiritual view of the natural world, his theory of the “unity of nature,” and by his intense and detailed collection and descriptions of natural and human materials (Falk et al. 2022). Spix and Martius re-interpreted and expanded Humboldt's data and traveled extensively throughout Brazil between 1817 and 1820.6
A brief account of their encounter with the Munduruku gives some insight into the context of collection. Toward the end of their journey when returning to Belém to board a ship to Europe, Martius went ahead in a smaller hunting boat, followed by Spix who by this time was seriously ill. Martius was keen to meet with the Munduruku, who, while noted as feared warriors and head-takers, had signed a “peace treaty” with the Portuguese in 1795.7 Over five days in late March 1820, Martius met with the Munduruku on the lower Rio Maderia in the region of the mission Novo Monte Carmel do Canomá. He reported that approximately a thousand Munduruku were living in the surrounding area (Schlothauer 2014: 134).
It was predictable that our heavy craft would only slowly fight its way to Canomá, the first mission of the Mundrucús; I therefore hastened there in advance in a montaria with four Indians and a hunter, to remain for a longer period of time among these Indians who are cited as one of the most powerful and peculiar tribes of the whole province of Rio Negro. (Translated from the original German by Simon Schaffer, Spix and Martius (1823–1831, Vol 3: 1307).
After this brief sojourn, Martius again went ahead of Spix and on the evening of 25 March, he reached the Provocãdos Mauhés, where Munduruku were living among the Mauhé (Tupi) peoples (Schlothauer 2014: 134). During these brief encounters Martius collected a wide range of ethnographic material, including elaborate featherwork (Zerries 1980: 175–209). While scientific, imperial and colonial rationales underlay the process of collecting, unfortunately there is little detail about the interactions between Martius and the Munduruku that could inform a more thorough examination of the contingencies and agencies of field collecting (Dubald and Madruga 2022).
Following their return to Munich in 1820, their extensive collections were divided and became foundational to the development of the Bavarian State museums of botany, zoology, and ethnology (see Herzog-Schröder, this volume). Martius was appointed the keeper of the botanic gardens and herbarium in Munich, and in 1826, he became professor of botany at the university. Spix was appointed the first conservator of the Bavarian zoological collections, but tragically died in 1826 of diseases contracted during his Brazilian journeys.
The results of the expedition were published in three volumes, along with an Atlas containing 41 plates and 7 maps (Spix and Martius 1823–1831). In keeping with Humboldt's world view, the frontispiece was produced by the Romantic painter Peter von Cornelius (figure 4). The classically inspired figure at the top center of the frontispiece likely represents the equator. The figure in the top left is a personification of a river god, most probably referring to the Amazon, while the figure on the top right appears to be a personification of the dramatic mountain ranges in the region. Importantly, the frontispiece also foregrounds Germanic political and ideological ambitions as revealed by the contrasting scenes at the bottom of the page. On the left, German explorers seek knowledge within a harmonious Indigenous setting, whereas on the right, Iberian soldiers are massacring the Indigenous inhabitants. A latent motif emerges, namely, “the replacement of the Iberians, and their gold thirsty empire connecting Europe to the ‘New World,’ by the Germans, who are depicted as promoters and builders of a new natural and universal history” (Uchôa 2019: 102).
Frontispiece to the Atlas Zur Reise in Brasilien von Dr Spix and Dr Martius, 1831. Courtesy of Museum Fünf Kontinente München, photo: Nicolai Kästner 4413/1.
Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120108
While Spix and Martius mainly focused on the documentation and collection of specimens now assigned to botany and zoology, their written and visual accounts also provide invaluable insights to the Indigenous peoples they encountered and the artifacts they collected. Their descriptions of tattooing and body ornaments are particularly rich.
these Indians [Munduruku], together with the Mauhés, are the greatest artists of feather-work. Their scepters, hats, caps, long garlands and tassels, which they wear like a mantilla over their shoulders at the dances, and aprons of ostriches and other feathers, which they wear about their loins, rival the daintiest works of this kind in the nunneries of Portugal, Bahia and Madeira. The ethnographic cabinet in Munich has a large number of these items, which we were able to trade there. The feathers are carefully sorted by the Mundrucús, tied together or glued together with wax, and many parrots and hoccos are kept alive especially on this account. Here, too, I am assured that they have the habit of plucking the feathers out of the parrots and dabbing the sore spots with frog blood until the feathers that grow back change color, namely from green to yellow. (Translated from the original German by Simon Schaffer, Spix and Martius 1823–1831, Vol 3: 1312).
It seems significant and comparatively novel that the description of tapirage by Spix and Martius is firmly positioned within the cultural features of Munduruku personal adornment, and not, as in many earlier accounts, set solely within comments on natural history. A colored illustration depicts eight men from different Brazilian cultural groups characterized by their tattooing and body decoration, including the figure with Munduruku headdress (Spix and Martius 1823–1831, Atlas: plate 35) (figure 2). Spix and Martius also favorably compared the skill and aesthetic qualities of Munduruku featherwork with that of the finest European examples. It is telling that feather caps with long garlands and tassels (which aptly describes the style of Munduruku headdress) are compared to delicate silk and lace mantillas considered to be the height of fashion for Spanish women.
Giglioli and the Munduruku Headdress
While the Munduruku headdress displayed in the COLOUR exhibition at MAA is remarkably similar to the example in Munich, its early collection history is uncertain. An exploration of its provenance has revealed a web of international relations between collectors and museums, and between natural historians and ethnologists. The headdress cared for in Cambridge was obtained through exchange between MAA's founding Curator Baron Anatole von Hügel and Enrico Hillyer Giglioli, an acclaimed Italian zoologist and ethnologist. Given the materials and style, there is no doubt that the headdress originates from the Munduruku, but there is no information as to how or when it was acquired by Giglioli prior to its exchange with MAA.
Giglioli was born in London in 1845 to an exiled Italian patriot and an English mother. Between 1881 and 1883, he studied natural history at the Royal School of Mines in London (now Imperial College) where his intellectual development was strongly influenced by leading Darwinists, including Thomas Henry Huxley. He then obtained a degree in science at the University of Pisa in 1864. Between 1865 and 1868 Giglioli was a naturalist and later leader of a scientific expedition around the world initially led by Filippo De Filippi in the warship Magenta (the first such expedition promoted by the unified Kingdom of Italy).8 Following his return, he donated specimens and artifacts obtained on the Magenta to the University Museum in Florence. Giglioli taught zoology in Florence from 1869, became full Professor of Zoology and Director of Collections from 1874 and Director of the University of Florence Museum of Natural History “La Specola” in 1876 (Bigoni and Barbagi 2022). Founded in 1775 by the Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Lorraine as the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History, this early public museum aimed to present nature in its completeness. Visitors went from the earth (mineralogy) to the sky (astronomy) passing through galleries of zoology, botany, and anthropology. As in Munich, in the later nineteenth century, this unitary vision of naturalist knowledge was dispersed into specialist collections, associated with the development of new academic divisions within the university.
When the National Museum of Anthropology was established in 1870, as a branch of the University Museum of Natural History, its founding director Paolo Mantegazza advocated for a natural history of man that encompassed (physical) anthropology, ethnology, and comparative psychology (Barsanti and Landi 2014: 2–23). While primarily noted for his encyclopedic expertise on vertebrates, and as a scholar of fish and birds, Giglioli was actively involved in developments within ethnology, and he had an enormous impact on the development of the Florence Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Bigoni and Barbagli 2022). His extensive knowledge and investigative skills are exemplified by his ground-breaking research on identifying and documenting the Florence collection of nearly two hundred objects collected on the Pacific voyages of James Cook (Bigoni and Barbagli 2022; Kaeppler 1978).
Giglioli was a voracious collector of ethnography as well as natural history, and a key player in an extensive international network of relations between museums, collectors, and objects (Bigoni and Barbagli 2022). Over decades, he exchanged objects with numerous institutions around the world, building up an extensive personal collection.9 An avid correspondent, he also traveled to various European museums to meet with curators and view collections. Among his many contacts, Giglioli established a close personal and professional relationship with MAA's founding curator Baron Anatole von Hügel. Correspondence in MAA's archives includes a series of letters spanning over a decade from 1891 that discuss object types and exchanges.10 The tone of the letters and greetings sent between their wives reveal a familiar intimacy and suggest that they had met in person on at least one occasion.
The Munduruku headdress at MAA was part of an exchange of 16 objects in October 1903, along with other South American artifacts and stone tools from central Africa. Giglioli's correspondence with von Hügel, highlights the jovial competition between collectors and suggests that the Munduruku headdress was one of the numerous highly desired “type” specimens, exchanged between ethnography museums in their never-ending goal to develop a comprehensive universal collection.
Of course, dear von Hügel, that Mundurucú feather head-dress is yours and I shall send it off soon . . . I am sure that you will like it! I shall also send some of those Tumba (Congo) palaeoliths. But surely you must manage to send me a couple at least of those Rhodesia stones, for truly amongst several hundred (I quote your words) you cannot fail to find a couple of recent specimens for your old friend Giglioli who has nothing from Rhodesia! (Letter from Giglioli to von Hügel, 26 August 1903, MAA Archives)
A month later, Giglioli wrote to von Hügel acknowledging the receipt of some Rhodesian stone tools and a Viti (Fijian) whale's tooth necklace and described the headdress he was putting in the post along with other items included in the exchange. “The Mundurucú feather cap, long desired and long promised, it is a beauty of the good time for such splendid ars plumaria now long passed. That specimen was collected on the Rio Canderey upper Tapojos, about 1850 and I believe that none such can be got now” (Letter from Giglioli to von Hügel, 22 September 1903, MAA Archives). Von Hügel responded with delight: “My dear Giglioli, You indeed have made us happy with your consignment of desiderata. The Mundurucu cap has lost nothing of its beauty since I saw it in your hands now eight years ago” (Letter from von Hügel to Giglioli, 16 October 1903, MAA Archives).
The documentation in MAA's accessions register notes that it was from “Rio Caderery (Tapajoz) Brazil” and gives a date of 1850. Surprisingly, there is no reference to the practice of tapirage in the accession registers, associated correspondence with Giglioli or in any of MAA's documentation. In assembling representative types of objects from around the world, the Munduruku headdress appears to have simply been classified as a rare and outstanding example of Amazonian featherwork ornaments. While the headdress is an intrinsically fascinating object, knowledge of the process of production only emerged as part of preparations for the COLOUR exhibition, as noted above.
The Munduruku headdresses in Cambridge and Munich highlight the close interrelationship between natural history and ethnography collecting in the nineteenth century. Yet, when these collections arrived in Europe, they were typically divided between museums and institutions according to distinct disciplinary formations. More recent anthropological accounts of the practice of tapirage and the use of feathered ornaments in ritual dances demonstrates the permeability of nature/culture relations within their Indigenous setting.
Parrots and Humans
Tapirage was used by numerous Amazonian groups, some of whom still continue the practice today, including the Mehinaku (one of the Xinguano peoples), Enawenê Nawê, and some of the peoples of the Pirá-paraná (Bará, Barasana, Eduria, Makuna, Tatuyo). While domestic parrots are generally known for their ability to form close bonds with people, for many Amazonian peoples there is a particularly close affinity between parrots and human beings. Young birds are captured from their nests and brought back to the village where they are carefully nurtured within the household.
The process of tapirage usually involves plucking the green or blue feathers of a domesticated parrot. The raw skin is then covered with a liquid that typically includes a milky secretion from the skin of the monkey frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor). This procedure was witnessed by Hugh-Jones when working in Rio Pirá-Paraná, Colombia, in the 1990s. In 2006, Gilton Mendes dos Santos described the process used by the Enawenê Nawê, a small Arawak-speaking group who live in the border region between Brazil and Bolivia and keep poison dart frogs in jars, harvesting their secretions by rubbing their backs with a stick. The resulting liquid is mixed with plant substances and applied to the parrot's raw skin.11 When the feathers grow back, they are transformed from green or blue into golden yellow, sometimes with streaks of red (Verswijver 2021: 81). A different method of changing the color of feathers on living parrots is described by Gustaaf Verswijver based on his 2012 fieldwork with the Mehinaku. The Mehinaku feed river turtle eggs to parrots throughout the dry season resulting in some of the green feathers turning yellow (Verswijver 2021: 84).
Domesticated parrots are by far the most common birds associated with tapirage. The primary sources of pigmentation are psittacofulvins and melanins that produce a spectrum of colors from white, yellow, and red to green, blue, and black (Berthier 2016: 43; Buono 2012: 236–237). The process of tapirage suppresses the deposit of melanin in the feather, changing darker feathers into yellow and red. A close examination of the tapirage feathers on the Munduruku headdresses in Cambridge and Munich revealed that the rachis or shafts of many of the feathers are white, indicating that no melanin is present.12
The allure of the Munduruku headdress is heightened by the shimmering effect of the feathers. Research for the COLOUR exhibition revealed that color is not only the result of pigment, it can also be a structure. In the exhibition, the display of the Munduruku headdress was positioned beside a case exploring iridescence (structural color), where the effect is produced by the movement of the viewer and minute variations in the surface structure. Recent scientific comparisons of natural parrot feathers with those subjected to tapirage show that the process changes the feathers’ structure as well as their pigment. The color of normal feathers comes in part from their ribs, which carry large cells containing pigment granules (melanosomes) as well as spongy structures. Analysis with a scanning electron microscope has revealed that after tapirage, the melanosomes entirely disappear and the spongy structures are disordered and slightly more separated from each other, demonstrating that there are major structural changes (Berthier 2016: 45–46).
Indigenous practitioners of tapirage would give different explanations, which are rooted in a deep environmental knowledge of the properties and effects of plant and animal substances. Great effort and importance are attached to transforming the color of parrot feathers. While the styles of headdresses and the details of belief systems vary between different Amazonian groups, the golden feathers produced by tapirage are associated with the sun and used in headdresses worn during communal ritual dances. The Enawené Nawê wear a sun-diadem headdress composed of radiating tapirage feathers; the variations in the yellow feathers with red nuclei are arranged to represent the daily solar cycle with the red patches gradually getting larger toward the center of the headdress (Rodrigues de Souze 2011: 43 in Verswijver 2021: 82). While the golden feathers are said to imitate the sun, there is a more complex symbiotic relationship. In their 2006 doctoral thesis, Mendes dos Santos recorded an Enawené Nawê man who explained that they wear the feathers “so that the sun does not forget that we are the ones who created him” (Ibid).
Anthropologists, historians, and philosophers have long demonstrated the porous boundary between nature and culture, humans and animals. Within the Amazonian context, the work of Christopher Crooker (1977), Philippe Descola (2012), and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) have explored these ideas on metaphoric, structural, and ontological levels, respectively. The Munduruku headdress is a particularly fertile example of the complex and multiple transformations between parrots and humans embodied within a museum object. The extant examples in Munich and Cambridge were collected, described, and exchanged by highly distinguished natural scientists with overlapping interests in ethnography. The headdresses are made from the feathers of parrots who are treated like kin—nurtured like human babies and hand-fed with masticated food. Parrots live within the household and when they die, they are buried in the house under the perch in the way that people may be buried underneath their hammocks. The process of tapirage is a human intervention that mixes animal substances (frog secretions or the fats in river turtle eggs) and plant substances to change the color of feathers on a living parrot. The golden feathers produced by tapirage are associated with the sun and used in headdresses worn in ritual dances. Feathers enable birds to fly and while the belief systems and styles of headdresses vary between different groups, there appears to be a shared notion that dancing is like flying. Parrots, like humans, have souls that are destined for the celestial world and people look forward to being reunited with their parrots after death.
While there is a strong association between the iridescent golden feathers and the sun, there appears to be more going on here than simply the desire for a particular color. Natural yellow feathers can be sourced from different types of birds, such as toucans, and are included in Munduruku and other Amazonian body ornaments. The close affinity between humans and their parrots is clearly an important factor. Great care must be taken in harvesting feathers from living birds. While the bird undoubtedly suffers from having some of its feathers plucked and the follicles anointed with an irritating substance, it has been suggested that this is part of a gift or exchange between the parrot who gives up some of its feathers to its human companion who nurtures them (Reina and Pressman 1991: 112; Tupinambá 2022: 18).13 Key to this symbiotic relationship and the agency of tapirage is the process of metamorphosis. There is a kind of mimesis between the transformative process whereby the color of feathers on living birds is altered, and the spiritual transformation that occurs during ritual when wearing a headdress crowned with tapirage feathers. The idea of mimesis has been explored by Amy Buono, with reference to historic Tupi feather capes. Largely composed of red ibis feathers, some of which have been turned yellow through tapirage, the binding techniques and use of contour feathers imitate the sleek body of the scarlet ibis. She suggests a kind of “doubling of ritual metamorphosis,” whereby a human is transfigured into a bird that itself has been transformed by color (Buono 2012: 243).
There may also be a mirroring between the ecology of the forest and the structure of the headdress. Other Amazonian groups, such as the Wai Wai in Brazil, explicitly design and wear their feather ornaments in tripartite vertical arrangements that match the natural habitat of different birds (Howard 1991: 56). Ornaments are assembled with the feathers of eagles from the upper sky at the top, feathers from macaws and parrots who inhabit the middle sky placed centrally and the black feathers of the ground-dwelling curassow at the bottom. While there is no similar ethnographic account for the Munduruku, it is notable that the composition of their distinctive headdress also follows a similar three-tiered arrangement with feathers transformed by tapirage and associated with the celestial realm on the crown, natural parrot tassels, and macaw feathers hanging below the cap with fringes of curassow feathers at the bottom.
Conclusion
The practice of tapirage and the knowledge of how to use frog poison and/or other substances to change the color of feathers on living parrots is indicative of a much broader Indigenous understanding of the medicinal and transformative properties of animals and plants in the Amazon. The Munduruku headdress (and other artifacts) in museum collections points to a deep environmental knowledge imbedded in distinctive ontologies and cultural practices. While the Munduruku no longer practice tapirage,14 the technique is still used by some Amazonian groups, as noted above.
It is possible to reactivate knowledge and power inherent within historic collections in collaboration with Indigenous knowledge holders. A salient contemporary example is the remarkable work of Glicéria (Célia) Tupinambá, an Indigenous artist,15 activist and cultural leader from Serra do Padeiro village, in the Tupinambá de Olivença Indigenous Territory in Brazil.16 Tupinambá’s work focuses on the revival of traditional knowledge practices, through dreams and by connecting with museum objects, particularly the Tupi feather mantles that were collected during encounters between European colonists and Indigenous peoples from the sixteenth century onward17 (Tupinambá 2022).
For Tupinambá, the mantle comes “from heaven, from a sacred place, and it is the link between heaven and earth, as well as the cosmos . . . because it's made of bird feathers and the birds fly . . . The mantles’ weave is the network of the heavens ” (Tupinambá 2022: 16). Inspired by the loan of a seventeenth-century mantle from Copenhagen to an exhibition in Sãn Paola, Tupinambá made two mantles between 2020 and 2022. One was for the local chief and one was donated to the exhibition The First Brazilians at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro. The second mantle survived the devasting fire in 2018 that decimated most of the museum's collections, raising questions about the future of related material in European museums (Perry and Schorch 2023). Crucially, the creation of new mantles awakened a sense of empowerment and connection to Tupinambá territory and inspired a local revitalization of language and cultural knowledge and skills. The mantle has been described by Bruno Brulon Soares as an “integral object,” drawing on the notion of the “integral museum,”18 which encompasses society, nature and culture in all their processes and transformations” (Soares et al. 2022; Tupinambá 2022: 20). Tupinambá advocates for Indigenous peoples to open a dialog with museums, so that artifacts can “continue to live, and return to their territory, in a new, different way . . . so [the museum] is the place of a new story, with another shade of history” (Tupinambá 2022: 22). The Tupi mantles in European institutions are ascribed with a presence and agency within the museum: “There are 11 mantles in Europe. I see this as a brilliant idea of the part of the Tupinambá. Having artifacts locked up so that they become landmarks of occupation and territorial reach, witness to the fact that the Tupinambá also occupied Europe” (Tupinambá 2022: 21). In 2023, the National Museum of Denmark agreed to return the mantle to Museu Nacional, which is under reconstruction.
The iconography of the frontispiece made by Cornelius for Spix and Martius, with its evocation of their Humboldtian legacy and the celebration of unities of natural order can be connected with the issues developed here. Humboldt and his legacy have become important themes in recent discussions of the emergence of ecology and its politics (Falk et al. 2022; Wulf 2015). But often these arguments neglect or marginalize the roles of Indigenous cultures in the formation and course of ecological knowledge and its material and practical dimensions, as though an awareness of the crucial interactions between natural and cultural lives was a prerogative of modern European sciences. The re-evaluation and activation of materials now held in museum collections and their reconnection with source communities can help change and advance these projects in more sensitive and constructive ways.
Acknowledgments
I am extremely grateful to Amazonian anthropologist Stephen Hugh-Jones for introducing me to the process of tapirage. I thank Daniel Simpson for inviting me to present an early draft of this paper at a workshop “Museum Futures: Material Cultures of Ethnography and Natural History as Archives of Environmental Knowledge” at MAA in July 2023. The project is part of a larger collaborative initiative between Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge directed by Philipp Schorch and Nicolas Thomas. I am grateful to them for their inspiration and support for my research. A huge thanks is due to Rosa Dyer for her generosity in sharing her ethno-ornithological knowledge and information related to her doctoral research on the use of feathers in objects made by South American Indigenous Peoples. I also thank Gabrielle Herzog-Schröder, Hilke Thode-Arora, and Jessica Bekesi for their assistance with researching the Spix and Martius collections at Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich, and Francesca Bigoni for her insights into Enrico Giglioli and the Amazonian feather-work at the Museo di Antropologia e Etnologia, University of Florence.
Notes
This style of headdress is sometimes referred to as a hood or cap.
Munduruku is the most common contemporary spelling, but Mundurucú is also used. Spix and Martius used the term Mundrucús. The people also refer to themselves as Wayjuya.
Tapirage is also spelled tapiragem.
Until 2014, Museum Fünf Kontinente (Museum Five Continents) was known as the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde (Bavarian State Museum of Ethnology). It was founded in 1862 as the first ethnological museum in Germany.
Andreas Schlothauer's exhaustive overview of early Munduruku and Apiaká featherwork in European museums notes that the first documented Munduruku feather ornaments had arrived in Europe by 1784 (Schlothauer 2014). Of particular importance is the Johann Natterer Collection from the Austrian Expedition to Brazil (1817–1835), now at the Weltmuseum in Vienna (Schlothauer 2014; Augustat 2012).
Humboldt never traveled in Brazil, having been refused entry when he arrived at the border from Venezuela in 1800. Brazil opened to international trade and scientific exploration after the Portuguese court had migrated to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 following the French invasion of Portugal. The court did not return to Lisbon until immediately after the period of Spix and Martius’ expedition (Augustat 2012: 14).
The history of Munduruku relations with the colonialists is extremely complex and varies between groups (Kapfhammer 1912).
Giglioli took over the leadership of the expedition after the death of De Filippi in Hong Kong in 1867.
After his death in 1909, Giglioli's personal collection was passed on to his descendants, who then sold it to the Pigorini Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico in Rome. Established in 1875 and opened in 1876 by Luigi Pigorini, from 2016 its collections became part of the newly instituted Museo Delle Viviltá (Museum of Civilizations).
MAA catalog records include 58 entries for a diverse range of archaeological and ethnographic artifacts from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific sourced through exchange with Giglioli between 1888 and his death in 1909. See MAA. Homepage. https://collections.maa.cam.ac.uk (accessed 15 August 2024).
According to Alfred Russel Wallace, the frog secretions are produced by pricking its skin with thorns to release blood and then placing frog in a pot with red pepper (Buono 2012: 238).
There are also rare examples of albino parrots, which Buono suggests may have held a particular fascination (2012: 240–241).
Feathers may be harvested from other domesticated birds, such as “macaws, curassows, guans, toucans, and rheas” (Reina and Pressman 1991: 112).
The Munduruku, traditionally inhabit forest regions on the margins of navigable rivers and their villages are within patches of savannah within the Amazonian rain forest. As with other Amazonian groups, they are fighting to retain the integrity of their territory. Their homelands have been threatened by extreme environmental degradation related to pressures from hydroelectric dams, illegal gold-panning, and waterway construction on the Tapajós.
Tupinambá’s artwork is photography and video based. She received the PIPA Prize for Brazilian Contemporary Art in 2023 (PIPA: The Window into Brazilian Contemporary Art. 2024. “Glicéria Tupinambá.” https://www.pipaprize.com/gliceria-tupinamba/ [accessed 15 August 2024) and, in 2024, curated the Brazilian pavilion at the Venice Biennale (Angeleti 2023).
There is a shared ancestry between the Munduruku and the Tupinambá as part of the Tupi language group.
The 11 early Tupi mantles in European museums, include a remarkably well-preserved early seventeenth-century cape at the National Museum of Denmark and one currently on display in the Museo Antropologia e Etnologia, University of Florence, which was present in the Cosimo II de'Medici collection in 1618.
The “integral and integrating museum” is a concept developed from over 50 years of practices and reflections from the Global South (Soares et al. 2022).
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