Welcome to the companion website for the upcoming The Body-territory of the Rainforest: Revisiting the Thayer and Morgan Expedition Collections through Cosmovisions and the Legacies of Slavery Accelerator Workshop.  We are very excited for this event, taking place on May 30-31, 2024 and we look forward to seeing everyone soon.  Please feel free to explore this website.  We will strive to make sure that the most up-to-date information is installed.  Thank you.

Executive Summary

This workshop will feature an interdisciplinary group of Brazilian (Indigenous, Afro-Brazilian, Mestizo) and US-based artists, art historians, curators and scientists to revisit and reframe objects collected during the 19th century Thayer and Morgan expeditions to Brazil and housed at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. We aim to confront the imaginary about Brazilian Rainforests created by Europeans and Americans and expressed through these collections. We will counter this from a Latin American perspective, with the different ontologies of Indigenous and African diasporic Brazilian cultures regarding the region they share with an extraordinary diversity of plants and animals. This workshop will approach the debates around the Amazon and Atlantic Rainforest territories, which are home to the greatest number of plant species on Earth. Using worldviews of African diasporic and Indigenous peoples, as well as feminist and de-colonialist perspectives, we will center the body-territory relationship in the Brazilian Rainforest, both in the sense of the human and non-human body as territory and of the territory/land as a living, breathing body. In addition to highlighting the different cosmovisions of forest peoples (Indigenous, Mestizo and Afro-descendant) regarding their own body-territory, we will also seek to analyze, discuss and visually re-present how the museum collecting of fossils, fish, archaeological ceramics, photographs, and botanical specimens has contributed to the commodification of the Rainforest’s body and territory. In addition, we will examine how the 19th century Brazil-United States relations and their legacy of Indigenous and African slavery are intrinsically tied to the destruction of this biome.

Workshop Organizers

Ilisa Barbash, Museum Curator of Visual Anthropology, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Thomas Cummins, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences