Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Artigo Acesso aberto Produção Nacional Revisado por pares

BIBTEX RIS

Do teatro da memória ao laboratório da história: a exposição museológica e o conhecimento histórico (fim)

1995; Universidade de São Paulo, Museu Paulista; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1590/s0101-47141995000100011

1982-0267

Ulpiano Toledo Bezerra de Meneses,

Museums and Cultural Heritage

From the Theater of Memory to the Laboratory of History. Museum exhibits and historical knowledge. The paper aims at discussing conditions for the production and appropriation ot historical knowledge, once a museum denies evocation and/or celebration of the past as its legitimate purpose. SeveraI premises are surveyed within the general framework of material cultureconcepts: the irreplaceable role of collections and the need of establishing historicalproblems as basic guidelines; the social constructionof the historicalobiect as distinguished fromthe epistemological construction of the historical document; the rhetorics of museum exhibits and the fetishist,metonymicand metaphoric uses of objects etc. Livingmuseums,museological contextualizations, installationsete. are criticallyanalysed and their benefits, risks and mischiefsassessed (special attention isassigned to the observational paradigm of knowledge, and the biases of a naif realism). Implications of History as a discursive cognitive process are then considered, emphasizing the importance of setting U p methodological responsabilities for historical museums (how to produce historica understanding through objects, how to understand society as it searches intelligibilityand auto-image through objects).