Contributed by ISE members Elaine Elisabetsky and Kristina Plenderleith

A break in a field work at Gorotire. In the photo: Darrell, Beptopoop (a shaman and key informat to the Kayapó project), and Elaine.

Darrell Posey was an anthropologist and ethnobiologist who lived with the Kayapó Indians of Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s.

It was a time of rapid change in the Jê community and his research material recording Kayapó life at that time vividly records these changes. Darrell worked closely in the village with his shaman mentors, in particular recording their knowledge of plants and planting methods, knowledge which is irreplaceable. His collection of approximately 2,500 slides, 75 field notebooks and journals, and 30 videos, was given to the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, by Darrell Posey’s family after his death in 2001.

In Gorotire he had worked with an interdisciplinary international team of academic researchers examining all aspects of Kayapó life at a time when Amazonian groups such as the Kayapó had barely been influenced by Western culture, and when Western academic study still tended to research each aspect of indigenous life separately. However, for the Kayapó their culture and lifestyle was an interlocking whole.

This loose collaboration of academics was referred to as the Kayapó Project, but their work has never fully been written up and published as a collective body of research, and yet it presents to the world a unique model for multidisciplinary projects in ethnobiology.

Since the collection was donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum the slides have been catalogued and roughly identified. Further funds are now needed in order to complete the project.

The next step is to seek the collaboration of other members of the Kayapó Project to enrich and certify the accuracy of the information associated with each image, and to bring together the different strands of research. This will then make the collection a model for ethnobiology worldwide, of interest to anthropologists, ethnobiologists, and students of minority languages and Brazilian studies.

Information supplied by Darrell’s collaborators will increase its utility. With increased funding Pitt Rivers Museum will be able to supply digital copies to Brazil, probably through the Goeldi Museum where Posey spent many years coordinating the Kayapó project, and ethnobiologists in Brazil will then be able to use the collection for teaching about the life of indigenous groups in schools and in higher education.

Progress so far:

In July 2005 Kristina Plenderleith made contact with the Head of the Pitt Rivers Museum and, with support from the ISE, Elaine Elisabetsky was able to join Kristina Plenderleith in Oxford in order to make a preliminary examination of the Archive. The following was accomplished:

  • 2500 slides were looked at and described where possible and when information was relevant to the Collection (these had been classified at some stage but the information was lost);
  • The notebooks were looked at and marked with general comments, making references whenever possible to the slides;
  • Field note book entries and slides were cross referenced to Darrell Posey’s published papers where possible;
  • Boxes not yet in the Pitt Rivers collection were examined, screened for relevant material and labeled for further work. This material was then donated to the Museum;
  • Liaison with the Museum was strengthened and a project was put together for further fundraising purposes.
  • Progress then halted, partly because of the closure of the Pitt Rivers Museum offices during major building works, and partly because of a lack of specific funding for the project.

In October 2009, again with support from the ISE, Sandra Machado, who was the Kayapó Project research assistant, spent a couple of weeks in Porto Alegre reviewing the information which had been added in Oxford by Elaine Elisabetsky. Sandra had lived for a couple of years in Gorotire village as a research assistant to the Kayapó project, and was able to add valuable information.

The file describing the slides grew from 912 kb to 1.33Mb. This part of the work was only possible because the Pitt Rivers Museum made available a preliminary scan of the 2500 slides for Sandra Machado to inspect.

Now a further series of activities are planned:

  • Information on the slides needs to be completed by showing by them to Kayapó individuals in Pará;
  • Contact needs to be made with former members of the Kayapó project (Anthony Anderson, J.M.F. Camargo, William Overall, Kent Redford, Anne Gély, Warwick Kerr, Susannah Hecht, Gerhard Gottsberger, Carlos Rosario) in order to enrich information on the slides as well as having assistance with chronology and dating of slides;
  • The slides need to be scanned to Museum quality for the benefit of future research;
  • The notebooks need to be scanned and transcribed with Portuguese and Kayapó language entries in the notebooks translated, and a dictionary of Kayapó words compiled;
  • Cross references need to be made between the slides and field notebooks and published papers, as well as to book references on Kayapó (Jê) material culture, and to precise festivals and ceremonies depicted on slides;
  • Cross reference needs to be made between the Oxford collection and the Kayapó collection held in the Carnegie Museum (Pittsburgh),
  • Links need to be added to the slide collection to make coherent chronological and event sequences, and to topics (as had been in the “original” key classification of the slides thought to be made under Darrell Posey’s supervision)
  • Establish a base for Darrell Posey’s publications in one place with links to the photo collection. Darrell’s copies of his publications are now in the Pitt Rivers Museum and can therefore be accessed with the slide collection and notebooks.

Potential outcomes of the collection include:

  • The material collected under the Kayapó project is perhaps the best known ethnobiology multidisciplinary project, some would say the model project in the discipline, and as such should be made accessible to all students and researchers in the field of ethnobiology and related disciplines;
  • Generation of educational material at various levels of education (high school, undergraduate, graduate, post-graduate);
  • Creation of a relational database of the Kayapó project;
  • Generation of material for use in Kayapó schools and other Amerindian schools in Brazil.