Museums as Realms of (dis)Enchantment

On the night of September 2, 2018, a blaze swept through Brazil\u27s national museum, Museu Nacional, in Rio de Janeiro, destroying not only the colonial building, portions of which dated to the sixteenth century, but roughly 92 percent of the 20 million objects in its holdings. This was Brazil\u27s greatest encyclopedic museum, incorporating (among many others) collections of natural history, anthropology, archaeology, and art, thus forming the most comprehensive museum collection in the nation. Along with its many unique and irreplaceable collections, the Museu Nacional was also home to the country\u27s oldest Indigenous Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian materials (fig. 1)