Seguindo os passos de Karl von den Steinen: uma visita aos Bakairí (Mato Grosso, Brasil)

Abstract

Karl von den Steinen (1855 - 1929), a German ethnologist, undertook two expeditions to the Xingu region in the 1880s, having published his accounts of the region and its people in Germany in the late 19th century. In 1999 Karl von den Steinen's grandson, professor of political economy and history of economic thought at the University of Frankfurt a. M., Bertram Schefold, came to Brazil for a series of lectures on the theory of capital in Rio de Janeiro and visited the Bakairí in Mato Grosso. There he met Vilinta, Antônio's granddaughter, the indigenous Bakairí who guided Karl von den Steinen on his first expedition to the sources of the Xingu in 1884. The reunion between the descendants of the European and his Bakairí guide led to the elaboration of four projects, which were announced by Vilinta's son, Estevan, in the sense of cultural appreciation. Among them, it was proposed that a Bakairí delegation visited the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. This paper is Bertram Schefold's account of this trip, translated from German to Portuguese, in order to make it accessible to Portuguese-speaking readers and to contribute to the dissemination of the idea of ​​the Bakairí trip to Berlin, which has not yet been carried out.