Victor Bandeira and the collections of the National Museum of Ethnology: notes from fieldwork

Decolonisation has become a significant topic in contemporary museum and heritage studies. The research project “Representational Politics of Guinean Heritage in Portuguese Museums in the Transition from Colonial to Postcolonial Period: Histories, Transits and Discourses” discusses the meaning and value of the Guinea-Bissau heritage collected during the colonial era that is part of Portuguese museum collections. This essay focus on a documentary about Victor Bandeira (1931-), as part of the PhD research project. Bandeira is a collector that established an informal relationship with the National Museum of Ethnology (former Overseas Museum of Ethnology), in Lisbon, from the mid-1960s onwards, collecting a representative part of the museum’s non-European collections. He remains a living witness to this museum’s beginning years and can be considered a vital component of the museum’s history. Bandeira has been an object of enquiry in previous studies. However, there was missing an audio-visual perspective or, as the anthropologist Sarah Pink describes – a visual and sensorial ethnographic approach. This short article explores, from fieldwork observations, the relationship between two interdependent biographies: Victor Bandeira and the National Museum of Ethnography, reflecting on the data gathered and the experience of interviewing Bandeira, contributing to review past collecting practices and the museum’s history.