The National Museum Of Brazil Fire and the precariousness of language records
By Thomas Devlin
When a fire ripped through the National Museum of Brazil earlier this month, it was devastating. Museum officials have estimated that 90 percent of the 20 million items in the collection was destroyed. And while fundraising has already begun the process of rebuilding the museum, much of it simply cannot be replaced. This horrible moment reveals that our cultural preservation is not quite infallible.
One department that may have been completely destroyed in the blaze is the Documentation Center of Indigenous Languages. The department contained written and audio records of indigenous languages that are no longer known, like Tupiniquim and Mura. While the damage done has not been fully assessed, it seems these records have now been lost forever.
The loss of any artifacts is devastating, but the destruction of linguistic records can hit particularly hard. Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, a full professor of ethnology at the National Museum, wrote in the Washington Post about how this fire particularly hurts minority communities. Not only were the records used to create indigenous-language resources, but history is in a way erased:
“The vast collections of cultural artifacts, which could be loaned to indigenous and quilombola cultural centers to give children the precious, absolutely irreplaceable sense of their peoples’ historical significance, have been wiped out.”
Perhaps even more frustrating, however, is that writing and audio can easily be preserved. These days, you can record your own voice on your phone and preserve it seemingly forever, and it’s pretty easy to do. Why weren’t the last existing recordings of these languages kept in the cloud?
In a recent article in Wired, linguists from the National Museum of Brazil pointed at one problem in Brazil: not enough library science. Despite having amassed huge collections of cultural artifacts, the country just hasn’t invested enough resources into their preservation. And this isn’t to call out Brazil in particular, because it’s far from the only country where digital archives are in danger. It just happens to be the unlucky country that had to face the tragic consequences.
The real issue for the lack of digitizing, though, is the cost. The Wired article notes that there were initiatives to work on the digitization of the National Museum of Brazil’s archives, but it was basically an unaffordable process. In the past, language preservation projects have run up costs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars because the work is so long and arduous.
There are lots of groups out there (one example being the Endangered Language Alliance) that are doing a lot to keep dying languages alive, but without a much larger investment, there’s a lot at risk for extinction. As the National Museum of Brazil rebuilds after the fire, many hope it will provide lessons for other institutions. Assuming humans are to live thousands of years into the future, we are going to need to do a lot of work to not let our past be destroyed.
