Abstract

DIAZ VIANA, Luis. Non-textual narratives on identity: national discourse and ethnographic museums. Alteridades [online]. 2010, vol.20, n.40, pp.77-86. ISSN 2448-850X.

This paper examines how anthropological perspectives and reflections face the Western institutions like the National Museum (being anthropological or not) against its own contradictions and paradoxes. It also illustrates the discomfort produced, very often, by national museums of anthropology on those who hold power, with the example of the paradigmatic case of the Museo del Pueblo Español (Museum of the Spanish People), which has never managed to function coherently with its collections opened to the public. The comparison of this case with others having similar objectives but different positions, permits the unraveling of the strategies of representation, frequently fraudulent if not perverse, that museums develop in their attempt to tell the history of a nation, defining a model of culture and reducing this to some material relics of assumed or debatable value.

Keywords : museums; history; memory; anthropology; nation.

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