ICOM International Council of Museums - International Institute for ...

MUSEOS NACIONALES Y REPRESENTACIÓN: ÉTICA,MUSEOLOGÍA E HISTORIAÓscar Navarro – Maestría Virtual en Museología – UNA – CostaRicaAbstractMuseums play many roles in society but mostly, they are the preservers of the culturaland historical memory of the people. They are also a means through which people getin touch with aspects of reality that are beyond their space-time framework.Museums display people’s heritage in such a way that they contribute to the process of“nation building” and thus, they can become a ¨virtual site¨ in the service of the nation’sneed for political positioning and imaging, they can have political, economical, andpsychological influence on people. Thus they can be instruments in the social,economic, cultural and political development of nations and regions. Therefore,museums “are tools which can serve the ends of nation building.” They appropriatedthe history and memory of the people to devise a coherent account for the nation’sorigins and development in order “to find [and present] some meaning in thechronological sequence of events ...creating a shared experience.” And this sharedexperience was intended “to generate pride, and to foster consensus andidentification.”The way the pre-Columbian cultures –as well as the minorities – have been exhibitedalong National Museums in Latin America is rooted in the origins of the NationalMuseums after the wars of independence. At the moment of independence mostnations wanted to be identified as civilised and modern societies and thus they wantedto avoid any relationship with the original cultures of the continent. This way of thinkingwas the result of the long process of European conquest and posterior genocide of thenative cultures. The forefathers of these new states saw themselves as bearers of theEuropean tradition (i.e., Christianism, civilised, modern, etc.) By constructing thesemuseums they also build their history and they took away anything that was not inaccordance with the idea of country they wanted to build. Thus national museumsbecame a sort of national pantheon of heroes and collection of significant dates.In this discourse the pre-Columbian cultures were set aside. As in EuropeanEthnographical museums these cultures have been presented as something totallyalien to the actual indigenous groups. Their history is presented via the history of their“art”, the biology and ethnographic discourses. The forefathers of Latin Americannations tried to erase the achievements of pre-Columbian cultures by talking abouthistory from the independence war on. Independence meant not only the rupture withthe Spanish dominion but also with the idea of the indigenous peoples taking part in thecreation of the new nations. Being conquered cultures they were expelled of history.This way of presentation was present during the whole XX century and it became thecentre of many debates in different meetings of ICOM professionals however, nothingwas really done about it in order to solve this problem. At the beginning of the XXIcentury is still a subject to be debated, it is of vital importance for the theoretical as wellas for the historical museology to document the process of how the pre-Columbiancultures have been exhibited in National Museums along Latin America. Such a studymust show the where these decisions came from, why some museologists supported365