Paper short abstract:

Through analysis of how the Tupinambá of Olivença (south of Bahia, Brazil) inhabit their houses and territory, this paper explores the way they deal with memory. It looks at how enactments of experiences are far more important than celebrations of topographical sites or of archives about the past.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will explore ideas on non-archival memory. The paper is based on the ways the Tupinambá of Olivença (south of Bahia/Brazil) express their difficulties not only with regard to the absence of archives of publications, documents and artefacts about their past, but also with regard to their difficulties, in the present, to constitute any archive of their artefacts, books, documents and pictures. This is particularly meaningful considering that the historical Tupinambá are one of the most well know and documented indigenous groups in the history of indigenous people. The Tupinambá were living in Brazil and were contacted by travellers, colonial administrators and missionaries since the early sixteenth century.

The notion of non-archival memory will be addressed through a lens of the diminishing relevance that the Tupinambá attribute towards specific topographical places and, mostly, their difficulties in the constitution of a "Museum" of the Tupinambá. I argue that these attitudes are part of a general way in which memory is constituted through re-enactments of the past in the present and not in the past as an archive. This will be ethnographically addressed through the attitude of the Tupinambá towards 'place as memory'. Moving a home from one place to another (deconstructing and reconstructing it again) constitutes a landscape where memory is encapsulated in referents (such as fruit trees) not to be venerated as ancestors or a nostalgic attitude towards the past, but to be reminded for the lived experience of those who planted them.

In sum, the paper argues that for the Tupinambá memory is far more a possibility of renewing life than of celebrating the past and explores the consequences of these ideas for the understanding of places and the past in what is here referred to as 'non-archival memory'.