Tupinambá Clubs and Living Heritage: Diplomacy, Circulation, and the Reactivation of Objects Beyond the Display Case

Abstract

This paper proposes a reflection on Tupinambá clubs from the perspective of living heritage, engaging with contemporary debates on decay, decolonization, and custodianship in the Global South. Historically classified as “weapons” in colonial records, these clubs were incorporated into European collections under regimes of knowledge that detached them from their political, diplomatic, and relational functions. Drawing on historical research, museological analysis, and material investigation conducted in collaboration with European laboratories, I argue that these clubs should be understood as political technologies embedded in their own systems of authority, hierarchy, and social mediation. By challenging the modern category of heritage, founded on notions of stability, permanence, and preservation, I propose to think of these objects as living heritage, whose organic materiality participates in ongoing processes of transformation. The wood of the war club responds to time, humidity, fungi, and environmental conditions. This transformation, often interpreted as deterioration, can instead be reinterpreted through Indigenous epistemologies as ontological continuity. Decay is not failure, but part of a relational cycle. The paper also introduces the hypothesis of female signatures on the clubs, subtle marks, nearly imperceptible to the naked eye but potentially identifiable through material analysis technologies. These inscriptions challenge two persistent colonial narratives: the exclusive association of the war club with male authority and the idea that the absence of alphabetic writing implies the absence of authorship. By articulating orality, collective memory, and contemporary technological tools, the research proposes a relational methodology of approach, grounded in the request for permission, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the symbolic reactivation of objects. Thinking about Tupinambá war clubs in this way shifts them from the condition of artifacts frozen behind museum glass to recognizing them as contemporary political devices, capable of reorganizing historical narratives and projecting radical futures. Living heritage is not what remains intact. It is what continues in relation.