Social Science Research Council

"Feathered Identities and Plumed Performances: Tupinambá Interculture in Early-Modern Brazil and Europe"

My dissertation reconstructs the role of featherworking in the material and ritual culture of the Tupinambá peoples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Brazil, one of the most poorly understood New World cultures of the contact period. The colonial "interculture" that developed between the Tupinambá and the recently arrived European merchants, Jesuit missionaries and colonial authorities centered on ritual performance, theater and ceremonial costume. My research focuses on a set of cultural spaces that served as sites of Tupinambá performances: Brazilian coastal forests, Jesuit "aldeias" or missionary settlements, and the heterogeneous Kunstkammer collections of early-modern European courts. These European collections were the only places where the ephemeral ritual feathered capes, bonnets and rattles of the Tupinambá have survived. European attitudes towards the New World in general, and even the colonial process itself, were strongly shaped by the reception of Tupinambá material culture.My study begins with a technical examination of Tupinambá artifacts in order to reconstruct early Tupinambá material culture and the Jesuit-Tupinambá colonial interculture. Chapter 2 concerns ritual performance in Brazilian and European cultures, including the captive-cannibal complex, its gendering of feathered rituals and the role of costume within these warfare rites. European commercial and collecting practices in Brazil form the topic of my third chapter. I will examine the early history of the mercantile presence in Brazil and its relation to New World colonialism, especially regarding the importation of indigenous artifacts into princely collections. In Chapter 4, I use a set of printed, painted and cartographic images to reconstruct the early-modern symbolic assimilation of Brazil. My final chapter explores the intersection of art and natural history in Brazil through the end of the colonial period in the 19th century. Natural history played a critical role in the formation of a Portuguese New World Empire and aided the control of Brazil's vast spaces through the classification of its natural resources.