Professors José Maurício Arruti and Artionka Manuela Góes Capiberibe, from the Department of Anthropology at Unicamp, completed their doctorate years in the Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology (PPGAS) at the National Museum, which was destroyed by fire on Sunday night. In addition to them, other professors at the University express their shock at the loss of a collection with around 20 million items, which turned to ashes: Sidney Chalhoub, Silvia Hunold Lara and Pedro Paulo Funari, from the History Department; André Victor Lucci Freitas, from the Department of Animal Biology; and Antonia Cecilia Zacagnini Amaral, from the Zoology Museum. Criticism of the federal government, which drastically reduced resources to the UFRJ Museum, is present in all the statements.
Also read a note from Unicamp about the National Museum and other entities of the University
A first assessment of the tragedy was published on the website of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC), with information from researcher Paulo Buckup, from the UFRJ National Museum, still in the heat of that early morning. “The buildings of the Vertebrates and Botany Departments, Main Library, Classroom Pavilion, Archeology Laboratory at Casa de Pedra, Alipio de Miranda Ribeiro Annex, and the Teaching Assistance Service collection annex were not affected. The main building – Palácio da Quinta da Boa Vista – was a total loss, with the possible exception of the collection of mollusc material that I was able to help save thanks to a Collection technician who guided us through the darkness. The biggest losses were the exhibition materials and the collections located in the main building: archives and historical collections, most of the entomological and anthropological collections, arachnology and crustacean collections.”
'I went to sleep with my breast
tight with pain, anger and fear'
José Maurício Arruti
I studied at the National Museum for more than ten years. I started in 1989, before starting my master's degree, as a recently graduated History intern at the PETI group – Project Study on Indigenous Lands. I worked on the historical and ethnological archive that the PETI team had assembled, under the coordination of professors João Pacheco and Antônio CS Lima, and which would give rise to the Atlas of Indigenous Peoples of the Northeast (1990). During this period I was enchanted by the public debates promoted by professors and students from PPGAS in MN about public policies for indigenous people, which had real repercussions on these same policies. An experience that pointed out to me the possibility of merging History and Anthropology, as well as doing so with some transformative power over reality.
I started my master's degree at PPGAS in 1992 and finished my doctorate in 2002, at a time when the regulatory research and writing times for a dissertation and a thesis were four and six years. Training at the PPGAS at the National Museum has a profound impact on everyone who has been there. We were students of the main names that formed Brazilian Anthropology in several of its subareas and this was constantly demanded of us.
Around one of the internal courtyards of the large building of the National Museum were the classroom, the teachers' rooms, the secretariat and the Francisca Keller Library, an inexhaustible source of research, which gave us access to both the history of Brazilian Social Sciences, as for the most up-to-date international anthropological bibliography.
Between one activity and another, we crossed the courtyard as if crossing a scene suspended in time, silent and ceremonious, but which, since then, showed the wear and tear of the lack of resources for adequate maintenance. There were already dilemmas for the administration at the time, both the lack of space for the continued growth of the library and the risk that we all ran with one or another piece of plaster falling from the eaves of the historic building. This contrasted with the certainty that we were immersed in a space of knowledge and science, which we all revered, and whose allegory were the corridors of walls covered in furniture with drawers of catalog cards and glass cabinets, exposing thousands of lowercase and capital letters. archaeological pieces.
As I watched the scenes of the fire on TV Sunday night, I was left speechless and perplexed. My first reaction only came after spending hours watching the fire, as if to make sure that it wasn't just a nightmare. I sent a brief message to friends and colleagues in other countries with as much as I could express at the time: “The National Museum of Rio de Janeiro completely destroyed by the fire, which has lasted 5 hours. 200 years of scientific history. Thousands of years of documentary sources. One of the best anthropology libraries in the country. A hundred careers destroyed. An inestimable tragedy, which is a metaphor for an even greater tragedy.” I went to sleep with my chest tight with pain, anger and fear.
The National Museum was one of our greatest institutions, in every sense. It was a school, which forged me with iron and fire, and it was home to colleagues I like and admire. The National Museum was the symbol of the possibility that intellectual work has in converting an imperial civilizing project into a democratic civilizing project, forged in the struggle of knowledge against prejudice, racism and unequal power relations. This institution was destroyed, not by an accident, but by a competing political project. The destruction of the National Museum is the most painful mark of the critical moment that national society has reached, by degrading itself into the politics of ignorance, of opinion supported by meme, of selfishness transformed into theology, of the market that does not feed, but feeds itself of life. The destruction of the National Museum is the most spectacular act in a succession of acts designed to destroy Brazilian science, art, history and memory.
'I wonder what no more
we can learn
Sidney Chalhoub
The fire at the National Museum is a tragedy in so many aspects that it will take us a long time to digest it, to understand its meanings. The size of the loss will continue to be assessed in the coming days, as society's knowledge of all the assets that burned increases. As a historian, thinking that this is an institution dedicated for two centuries to natural history and the knowledge of diverse human societies, I imagine what we can no longer learn about the history of the production of knowledge about these subjects, about the forms of society Brazilian people know their own past, the past of other societies and the history of the spaces and species that constitute us.
In the long run, the fire is just another example of the notorious lack of care for our museums, archives and libraries, a true trait of our “national character”, if there is such a thing – if there is, we should call it a lack of national character . In the short term, it looks like a revenge of foolishness. The country's current government and the supporters of the right-wing project that engendered it, all usurpers of power through parliamentary and legal chicanery of various kinds, have condemned public universities and other cultural institutions to penury. They know that the lack of democracy has no refuge there, that there will always be resistance. It remains to be seen whether the next government, if it is not another enemy of science and culture, will immediately commit to a diagnosis and subsequent recovery of institutions of similar scale. I shudder to think how things are going at the National Archives, the National Library, the National Museum of Fine Arts, the National Historical Museum, etc., etc.
'I explain that the government
Federal is responsible'
Silvia Hunold Lara
It is not an announced tragedy. It's almost a metaphor for everything the country is losing in recent times, due to the immense carelessness with what is essential for the country: the right of people to have an identity, a national memory. That's what got burned. The loss is
immeasurable, considering the 200 years of accumulation of objects, images and knowledge relating to an infinite number of fields of knowledge, which cannot be replaced.
For a long time, resources had been requested for the National Museum, which held absolutely extremely important pieces not only for the history of Brazil, but of all the places and peoples with which we had relations – the throne of Dahomey, which D. João VI received as a gift, it was part of the largest collection in Latin America on African history. There is the same disregard for all museums and also universities, not just federal ones, Unicamp being a good example.
I want to clarify the responsibility of the federal government which, with the public spending cap, prioritizes certain areas and cuts resources for housing, education and science – this is a choice made by all authorities at the federal level. I heard from someone about the shame of telling future generations who let this happen. It is possible to rebuild the building, but the collection was unique. He died.
'For postgraduate studies it is
a high-grade seismic shock'
Artionka Manuela Góes Capiberibe
In my area, Anthropology, the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro had the most complete library in South America, super updated, with an archive of documents that had been formed for over 50 years. I completed my doctorate from 2004 to 2009 through the Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology (PPGAS), which was the first created in Brazil, with highly qualified professors, and which was a place for debate and very innovative knowledge. PPGAS has always had a grade of 7 [the maximum], since the Capes evaluation system was created, and numerous theses have been awarded.
This accident has an impact of gigantic proportions for the most different areas, and also for access by the population, as the Museum was a strong reference in education, with its archaeological and paleontological collection. Biological research was also going strong, despite dwindling support. Rich collections of indigenous material culture, such as featherwork and basketry, were lost. And all the documentation about the peasant region of the Northeast, donated by professors Moacir Palmeira and Lygia Sigaud.
For postgraduate studies, it is a very high level of seismic shock. The classrooms, the teachers, the records and research of several generations of students, and not everything was digitized. Documents such as letters from the royal family are absolutely irreplaceable.
The neglect is shocking. I entered the PPGAS doctorate from Unicamp with its well-organized rooms and equipment. I got a shock at the National Museum, with the leaks and exposed electrical wires. I saw that the quality of your research was not reflected in the infrastructure – and that has been the case for over a decade. The resource that arrives is almost a handout for science to move forward, a reflection of how the State treats knowledge, seeing it as an expense and not as an investment.
The contingency of resources for education and science suffocates and prevents progress. If this mentality does not change, incorporating the idea of science as fundamental for being present in people's daily lives, Brazil will really start to go backwards. Everything that is done today is due to the great effort of researchers. The National Museum is a historical and cultural heritage. Many people, like me, owe a lot to that institution.
'The Museum staff shouted
for help decades ago'
André Victor Lucci Freitas
From the point of view of our work, which is with biodiversity and conservation, this fire is an unimaginable catastrophe, with the loss of more than 20 million items, including the entire collection, for example, of lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) , which is my area of study. Imagine the loss of large collections made in the 1920s, 30s, 40s in the Amazon, in places where no one has ever returned, like along the Juruá; or historical material from Rio de Janeiro, from when the urban area had not yet swallowed Guanabara Bay: there were extremely important records to better understand how all this Brazilian biodiversity was distributed in the Atlantic forest. Even if we no longer had the environments, these specimens were a testimony that was lost forever.
To understand what might happen in the future, we sometimes use the past – and that past no longer exists. This Museum collection was not yet fully computerized and, as bad as it was, if we had photos and information, it would be an irreparable loss, but we would still have something to work with.
From a taxonomic point of view, of human cultural and scientific legacy, the types (holotypes and paratypes), which are basic material in the description of species, were lost, and a good part of the types of Brazilian species were in the National Museum. This cannot be replaced, one can eventually try to repair what was lost, but in a very bad way. Professor Keith Brown, my retired advisor, when he described new species or found important material, always left some of it at the Museum.
The saddest thing of all, when talking about an announced tragedy, is that the Museum staff had been screaming for help for decades, showing that the situation was complicated and dangerous, demanding an adequate and definitive way of preserving the material, if not the losses would be irreplaceable. And it happened.
I have many students and friends who can't stop crying today. It is like losing a very large portion of the work of countless lives. And this work was thrown in the trash overnight. Reconstruction, just of the building, as everything else goes back to scratch. Politicians will say they did their best, but we will only have a shell for the thousands of years of history that have gone away – Egyptian mummies, the oldest human fossil in America (Luzia), dinosaur skeletons, giant sloths. All of this will never be replaced.
'Collection loaned by
Unicamp was not reached'
Antonia Cecilia Zacagnini Amaral
It's really a shame for everyone, and especially for those of us who work with museums and other institutions. We have yet another record of forgetting the importance of activities in culture, education and science. The National Museum is not the first case, we had fires in Butantã and other museums. The country is in mourning, it is a loss that cannot be returned, there is no other collection like it.
The Unicamp Zoology Museum has specimens of vertebrates on loan to the National Museum, such as amphibians, reptiles and fish, which were not affected by the fire, according to the latest news, because they were in another location. It's difficult for people to value our work, but tragedies like this at least make the population show interest in science. Outside the university, I have neighbors who cried.
'There is no worthy future without a
critical relationship with the past'
Pedro Paulo Funari
There was an infinite number of unique and unparalleled materials there. A part was studied and published, but the funds were immense and much of it was not the subject of investigation. Another aspect refers to the loss to Brazil's intellectual history, as there was abundant documentation on Brazilian science since the establishment of Rio de Janeiro as the seat of the kingdom, later the national capital. Despite the various studies already published on this institutional history, the missing documentary collection still reserved a lot of information, lost forever.
The fire says a lot about the limited commitment of Brazilian society, especially its elites, to science and education, in general, and to heritage and the past, in particular. Resources are always scarce, but some restitutions from those convicted of corruption show that only a small part would be enough for the adequate maintenance of the National Museum. Science and education do not find the priority that would be a necessary condition for a society with better social, economic and human development, as well as to alleviate inequalities. Despite advances in recent decades, education and science continue to lack due attention, to the detriment of everyone.
Regarding the complicated relationship with the past, Brazilian society, very marked by conflicts and traumas (slavery, dictatorships), runs away from the past and takes refuge in the “country of the future”, to paraphrase Stephan Zweig (Brasilien, Ein Land der Zukunft, 1941). The creation of new capitals, such as Belo Horizonte (1897), in Minas Gerais, and Goiânia (1933), in Goiás, already showed this, something made national with the change of the capital of Rio de Janeiro, loaded with History and its conflicts (slavery, colonial spoliation, oligarchic governments, dictatorship, street fights), for a city created ex nihilo, facing the future, Brasília (1960). This illusory search for a future without the traumas of the past takes a heavy toll. While the Museum of Tomorrow was being created (2015), the Portuguese Language Museum was combusting (2015), the Paulista Museum (closed in 2013) and the USP Archeology and Ethnology Museum have had their exhibitions closed for many years. It is up to everyone to contribute to changing this situation, as there is no dignified future without a critical relationship with the past.
