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

and present, of asynchrony and synchrony’ 8 . We are all fully immerse in this dynamicsof traits, experiences, remains and perceptions that constitute our beings and throughwhich we shape our individual and social self, by means of mechanisms of change andof cultural reproduction. In such process, many times the incorporation of the newcontributes precisely to justify and reinforce values, concepts and world perceptionsthat are already established. But this does not signify the crystallization of the culturalprocess: all reproduction of culture implies an alteration.We must also remember that all conscious perception of reality has the character of arecognition: instinctively, we relate the perceived objects with pre-existent conceptsand/or perceptions, in a continuous movement – as the Gestalt analyses have so wellexplained. The same occurs with the logical structure of discourse, where the specificis assimilated in the interior of a more general concept: ‘objective representation is notthe starting point in the process of language building, but the final point’ 9 . Languagedoes not nominate, from the outside, objects that already exist – on the contrary, itmediates their shaping from inside out.We must thus analyze very closely the ways and forms by which such process isapprehended by museums. The appropriation of objects always depends on the eyesof the observer 10 , be this eye individual or collective; this process would be, therefore,always arbitrary and historic, related to pre-existent concepts, to specific ways ofconceiving the world and engaging in it.This is the problem of language, and of interpretation: facts and phenomena are notalways perceived and explained in the same way, by observes who use differentsymbolic systems, even when they occur in the same time or space. This problemprojects into the sphere of museums. As all the acts of re-reading of reality,interpretation is built from the differential relationships existent in the interior of a givensymbolic system (the cut in reality promoted by the interpretive movement); inmuseums, a new symbolic complex is added to the complex already created by otherlanguages - this hybrid that we call ‘museological language’.– Museum and the narratives of HistoryWe know that language cannot represent all the notions (ideas) that a referred objectawakens on the mind. This generates a disproportion between the word, the sign andthe referred thing: words will always say less than each thing signifies. But materialobjects (material things), when they become present in the discourse, will unveil to theobserver in their spectacular complexity, presenting, ‘under the form of experience,more properties and relations that could be chosen and valued by any other sign’ 11 .An unquestionable advantage of museological language must thus be recognized,when it is built over musealized material objects 12 : their symbolic force as elements ofpersonification of ideas.In the relationship between Museology and History, it must be taken into account thekind of relation that is being built, case by case. Museology develops a discourseabout History, and History has a discourse about museums. There is also a discourseabout History, elaborated by museums. This latter may be articulated, among otherforms, as academic language – and in that case, it will be defined and shaped by the8 SAHLINS, Marshall. Structure and History. (Estrutura e História). In: Islands of History (Ilhas de História). RJ: Zahar,1990 [1987]. p. 1809 CASSIRER, E. Apud SAHLINS, M. Op. Cit, p. 18310 Ibid., p. 18211 BRÉAL, J. Apud SAHLINS, M. p. 18512 We are here considering the expanded concept of object, which encompasses all the movable and inmovablereferences of material heritage.71