Masked Observers and Mask Collectors: Entangled Visions from the Eighteenth-Century Amazon

Time: 6:00 PM

Location: NYU-Gallatin, Room 801, 1 Washington Place, New York, NY

In the past two decades, physical anthropologists and paleoecologists have transformed our understanding of lowland South America’s human history, arguing for the historical presence of communities that would have rivaled the civilizations of the Incas and Aztecs in sheer population, ecological ingenuity, and cultural sophistication. Taking a cue from these scholars, and examining the cultural practices of European natural historians and the populations they encountered in the deep interior of the Amazon River basin, this talk explores visual, material, and ethnographic approaches to the history of cultural contact and seeks to integrate the history of material culture and “the occult life of things” into a broader understanding of Amazonian history at the end of the eighteenth century.