Abstract

This dissertation exams the origins and agency of museums and exhibitions, along with their collecting policies and displaying practices, in the configuration of early notions of national heritage in Chile. In so doing, it establishes the active participation of such institutions, policies and practices in the Chilean national identity-building process during the nineteenth century.
To corroborate this idea, it takes two postulates as its overarching pillars. The first, historiographical in nature, recognises Latin American national identities as a consequence, rather than a cause, of the struggles for independence in the early nineteenth century. The second, this time anthropological, assumes that the symbolic value of museum collections is not intrinsic to them, but rather imbued in them via political and intellectual operations. In applying these rationales to the case of Chile, this work concludes that the notion of the “museum” that circulated among the local ruling classes of the time was a plastic and malleable one, open to specific interests that ranged from the personal sphere to the national one, in negotiation with matters of class, family values, race and identity.
Throughout the five chapters that function as critical essays, this dissertation is an interdisciplinary exercise which seeks to trace the origins of practices that are still deeply ingrained in contemporary collecting and exhibiting “ways of doing.” In this manner, it provides evidence to both support its theoretical tenets and call into question the legacy and persistence of nineteenth-century practices in the museums of present-day Chile.