Guest contribution by H. Glenn Penny and Philipp Schorch
On September 2, 2018, the importance of the collections from what is now Brazil and kept in European museums increased dramatically. That day, the Brazilian National Museum in Rio de Janeiro went up in flames. Most of the 20 million objects burned. Many of the objects belonging to the indigenous societies of South America that have been brought together here since the museum was founded in 1818 are lost forever. With them, the information that anthropologists and other scholars had gathered about and with these groups also disappeared. In many cases, they were unique records of societies that have been subjected to unspeakable violence and destruction for centuries and to this day.