La representación del poder y el poder de la representación: la política cultural en los museos de Antropología y la creación del Museo del Traje

Abstract

This essay analizes the development, cultural politics and symbolism that lies beyond the substitution of the National Museum of Anthropology (branch of Spanish Cultures) into the Custom Museum. This resolution and the alleged reasons to get at this substitution point out several concepts which are worthwhile to be analized through an anthropological perspective: cultural diversity, a view of the past and the present, processes of change, ethnography and the use and representation of culture. In such a substitution there are meaningful ideological changes at different levels which point out not only to the cultural policy of a National Party but, more deeply, to new forms of life and thought of modern Spanish society, and tendencies, values and characteristics of the world we live in. They are the new values about the body and comsumption coming from the realm of fashion, the highlight of the cover in stead of the whole human being, the importance of the yellow press and the processes of elite magnification. There are interesting anthropological matters in and out of such museums and a discussion on the relationship of those with civil society.