Jananɨaɨ Iko is an object-based research project developed by two Murui-Muina (witoto) indigenous elders, Oscar Romualdo Román Jitdutjaaño and Alicia Sánchez, and Juan Alvaro Echeverri, who is a cultural anthropologist working in the Colombian Amazon.
In 1903, the British Museum received around 100 objects made by the Murui-Muina people of the then Peruvian and now Colombian Amazon. The objects were collected by the French explorer Eugene Robuchon, who was sent to document the atrocities caused by the period of intensive rubber extraction by the Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC). The rubber boom led to the near extermination of the Murui-Muina and other indigenous groups in the region. This collection has remained in storage at the museum since that time and has rarely been accessed by researchers, the public or the source community. This project seeks to reconnect the objects held by the British Museum with contemporary Murui-Muina people, allowing them to re-engage with cultural knowledge that has been forgotten because of the rubber boom genocide.
The Centre is interested in the social and political conditions which have either facilitated or prevented the acquisition of objects from certain regions of Latin America. Furthermore, this case study inverts traditional museum projects in which the knowledge linked to material culture can be used for research purposes. In this case, it is the people engaging with the collection that make the objects meaningful.
Publications related to women’s and maternal health with Wixárika communities by the author of this exhibition
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2013)
Shame as a barrier to health seeking among indigenous Huichol migrant labourers: An interpretive approach of the “violence continuum” and “authoritative knowledge”
Social Science and Medicine 97 75-81
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2023)
Wixárika Practices of Medical Syncretism: An Ontological Proposal for Health in the Anthropocene
Medical Anthropology Theory 10 (2) 1-26
Gamlin, Jennie B. (2020)
“You see, we women, we can’t talk, we can’t have an opinion…”. The coloniality of gender and childbirth practices in Indigenous Wixárika families
Social Science and Medicine 252, 112912
Jennie Gamlin and David Osrin (2020)
Preventable infant deaths, lone births and lack of registration in Mexican indigenous communities: health care services and the afterlife of colonialism
Ethnicity and Health 25 (7)
Jennie Gamlin and Seth Holmes (2018)
Preventable perinatal deaths in indigenous Wixárika communities: an ethnographic study of pregnancy, childbirth and structural violence BMC
Pregnancy and Childbirth 18 (Article number 243) 2018
Gamlin, Jennie B. and Sarah J Hawkes (2015)
Pregnancy and birth in an Indigenous Huichol community: from structural violence to structural policy responses
Culture, health and sexuality 17 (1)