Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Promesses de Patagonie: l’exploration française en Amérique australe et la patrimonialisation du ‘bout du monde’

2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jhc/fhac014

1477-8564

Peter Mason,

Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond

The work under review is a critical chronological survey of the growth of the holdings of items from Patagonia in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris from 1878, the year of the museum’s foundation, down to its closure in 1937. The expansion of those holdings is staggering: from 13 artefacts in 1878 to 2,311 in 1937. As the author relates the stages of that growth, also clearly presented in synoptic tables, she places the successive donations within the context of their collection on the basis of documents, travel accounts, maps and photographs. There were Patagonian objects in the French royal and other collections before 1878, such as the Mapuche ‘necklace of a Pehuenche savage of Chile’ collected by Joseph Dombey during a Spanish botanical expedition in 1777–85. But the oldest recorded entry of Patagonian artefacts in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro refers to a bow from the Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego, two Patagonian painted cloaks and other items collected during the voyage of Bougainville in 1766–67. Photographs and drawings played a prominent part in the exhibition Patagonie: Images du Bout du Monde, held in the Musée du Quai Branly in 2012. Among the early donations of this kind to the museum are several photographs of skulls (along with numerous actual skulls), and drawings of Patagonian settlements and persons by Ernest Goupil, made during the voyage of Jules Dumont d’Urville in 1837–40.