A World of Many Shades: documentation and troubles with designs and natural dyes in Indigenous Amazonia

Abstract

Collecting designs, drawings, and other repertoires among Indigenous peoples in South America is a long-standing practice. Although many works have discussed the subject, very few reflect, from ethnographic experiences, on documenting this type of knowledge. In this text, I describe in detail the process in which some Bora people in the Colombian Amazon and I conceived and put into practice a project to document graphic repertoires, natural pigments, and other related knowledge. This will lead us to examine the different dispositions of my interlocutors and the British funders of this project when faced with emerging problems. I argue that the Bora invite us to conceive documentation activities that combine a concern for non-human agency and for impacts on local transmission networks with a desire to ensure that knowledge is indeed recorded and preserved. In short, they inspire us to stay with the problem permanently.