Abstract The Museu da Ciência in Coimbra holds a wooden club whose provenance is ambiguous. On the one hand, it is attributed to the Xiriâna people and identified as one of the clubs that were widespread in the region of Guyana between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries; on the other, it shows similarities with the puratig, a sacred object resembling an oar or a paddle that is at the centre of the cultural system of the Sateré-Mawé, an Amazonian Indigenous people who have claimed ownership of the object on several occasions since 1997. By combining archival documents, academic literature and ethnographic sources, this article provides insights into the club’s provenance, challenging the usual attribution assigned to similar artefacts and enhancing the Indigenous perspective. The discussion responds to the debate on the decolonization of knowledge within museum spaces. To this end, Indigenous oral tradition is considered a key element in the development of the argument and as trustworthy a source as written documentation.
Anna Bottesi (Mon,) studied this question.