Etnografar museus e narrar pós-memórias: aproximações entre museus-casa

Abstract

This paper addresses reflections on museum ethnography experience developed in two house-museums: Maison de Balzac (Paris/France) and Casa de Memórias e Lembranças Chico Xavier (Uberaba/Brazil). The interpretative contributions are interwoven by the post-memory concept in order to analyze the strategic uses of the past involving cultural heritage issues, national identities and memory territories. The museums ethnography employed as this research methodology has promoted not only the proximity and contrast between the two house-museums as objects of study, but also reflections on the potentialities of testimonies and experiences in the Museology and Information Science field. As such, the results highlight expographic and conceptual proximity between both, while related distance is to temporal, geographic and conception issues of the two institutions. Therefore, they generate useful tensions in the relations between memorialistic records and strategic uses of certain narratives about the past.