Call for papers - Time, Memory and Silencing

At the beginning of the night of September 2, 2018, at the top of Quinta da Boa Vista, in Rio de Janeiro, one of the most important monuments of Brazilian historical and scientific heritage began to collapse. The resonances that marked the event can be seen from many places: the flames that for six hours turned to gray and erased a biological, ethnomusicological, ethnographic and historical collection of all the continents of the world; the water and the resources that were not enough to avoid the tragedy, composing a policy of visible neglect in infiltrations, cracks and closed exhibition rooms; the persistence of the bodies of teachers, researchers and brigadistas in an attempt to save what was possible. At the end of that night and in the days that followed, through the news, reports repeatedly transmitted the loss of archaeological and ethnological artefacts, documents from Brazilian and world history, collections with specimens of fauna and flora, all cultivated by multiple arms over the two centuries of existence of the National Museum.

The library, laboratories, exhibition rooms and classrooms, the incinerated administrative units remained there as a monument of an efficient policy of suffocation, erasure and asymmetry between the value of history and difference for the construction of a country project and of society and the reduced investment and recognition by public authorities in the successive spheres of the federation. Coupled with the pain of the efforts and years of work assembled and deposited as a contribution to a collective effort by certain collectivities until recently allocated more in place of exhibition objects than of producers of shared knowledge in exhibition spaces there was a sense of relief and solidarity. Relief that the fire, to a certain extent, freed the stories, people and contexts of violence, friendship, fear and discovery in which some of those objects were translated into artifacts. Solidarity because if there was a way to build a new museum, this process would irremediably pass through the collaborative exercise of learning with these collectivities.

Months after that, the movements of resistance and occupation of physical space and memory, which the Museum instituted in Brazilian scientific and museum politics, persist. It persists in the image of researchers days after the fire being accompanied by firefighters to identify and rescue parts of the collection that have survived. It resists the precious attitude of all those who worked there, in Quinta da Boa Vista and in the Museum, even in spite of the restricted working conditions in the Horto Florestal, and became the discovery of each piece that survived the flames, water, to debris and ashes, to neglect. Lucy's skull, the Bendego meteorite, the people.

Inspired by the situation of ambivalence and conflict that the fire in the National Museum implies for the constitution of a scientific and museographic policy in the Brazilian context, the Special section of the first semester of 2019 (vol.28, n.1) is to gather papers that discuss the relationships between time work, memory politics, and erasure projects. Organized as a thematic dossier, the Special section seeks to reflect on descriptive and analytical situations arising from ethnographic, historical or anthropological works that are dedicated to a wide universe of themes and spaces covered by the proposal. It is particularly interesting to reflect together on the narrative movements of constitution of alterity and divergence, the policies of approximation and distance between Museology, History and Anthropology, the ways of managing cultural heritage in different regional and national loci, the spaces of production of legitimacy for voices and subalternized memories, the dynamics of colonization of creativity and imagination, the processes of transference, silencing and erasure in the articulation embodied between social suffering, pain, healing and resistances.

Proposals submitted for the Special should be sent through the journal's electronic publishing system, following the guidelines and formatting guidelines that can be accessed in the Guidelines to Authors and Authors tab. The deadline for submitting the texts for the composition of the Special is January 31, 2019, in view of the publication of the volume in the first half of 2019 in June.