Trayectorias y desafíos de la historiografía de los museos de historia natural en América Del Sur

Resumo

Powerful tools of interchange and circulation of data and specimens, Natural History museums constituted themselves in several Latin-American countries, such as Argentine and Brazil as privileged loci of epistemic infrastructure since the nineteenth century. The museums gathered huge amounts of collections of surveys of territories and people, always proposed as comprehensive, ultimate and exhaustive endeavors, which made those institutions face the challenges of not only storing and displayng the collections and specimens but also how to order the latter in archives and catalogues that would make them intelligible. Problematizing issues already present in the nowadays consistent literature, including the Latin-American contribution, on museums, the paper discusses among other themes, the acritical identification between museums and the representation of nations and the recurrent notion of museums as place of memory. It proposes as a challenge to the new generation of scholar to ponder how to write these histories incorporating their human and non-human agents as well as the set of events and circunstances that generated their sucesses and failures.