Visitors to Mexico City's National Anthropology Museum have for the last 54 years marveled at that institution and its integration of cultural heritage with both monumental modernist architecture and the modern nation-state. Miruna Achim's invaluable new book, a history of the first half-century of that museum's predecessor, reveals the rocky start of the Museo Nacional in the tumultuous decades that followed Mexico's independence.
In 1825, Lucas Alamán, minister of internal and external affairs for the new nation, led the conversion of a mathematics classroom at the national university into a depository and exhibition space for antiquities, seashells, antique coins, minerals, and botanical specimens. The institution's goals of educating the public and fostering a national identity reflected the new nation's ambitions and the Enlightenment ideas that spurred the independence movement, but the endless and disruptive political battles that followed between liberals and conservatives, and between federalists and centralists, resulted in upheavals that prevented any sustained government support.
This troubled start of the museum contrasts with the contemporaneous successes and cultural acquisitions of many non-Mexican visitors, including Alexander von Humboldt, the fantastic Count Jean-Frédéric Waldeck, John Lloyd Stephens, and Maximilien Franck, some of whom exported important collections to Europe, in spite of laws designed to prevent this. The frankly imperialist ambitions of the governments of France and the United States (which took nearly half of Mexico's territory in 1848) made these exports something more than simply looted patrimony: symbolic appropriations that anticipated later land grabs. Both foreign visitors and Mexican scholars participated in debates about the rightful ownership and meaning of these archaeological objects, as well as the origins and nature of pre-Conquest societies, debates that Achim ably synthesizes.
One unlikely hero who emerges in this study is José Fernando Ramírez, a scholar, lawyer, bibliophile, politician, and the museum's erudite director during much of the 1850s and 1860s. He reluctantly collaborated with Maximilian's administration during the ill-fated Second Empire, which allowed him to accompany the Empress Carlota on her trip to the Yucatan peninsula, and he was subsequently forced into exile as a result, living out his last years in Germany. More so than Ramírez, some of the antiquarians, writers, and scholars discussed here—the English impresario William Bullock, Lord Edward Kingsborough, William H. Prescott, Stephens, and Frederick Catherwood—will already be familiar to students of the history of Mesoamerican archaeology; yet, through her meticulous and wide-ranging archival research, Achim sheds new light on their roles in this history. She devotes a chapter to a case study on the ruins of Palenque, and the visits there by the likes of the French abbot Henri Baradère and Waldeck. Early descriptions of the site led a Parisian geographic society to offer a prize to the author of the most thorough study of the site.
Parts of this history have been covered in other books, including Ignacio Bernal's Historia de la arqueología en México (1979), and the Dumbarton Oaks' anthologies Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past (1993) and Past Presented (2012). While there are a few inexplicable omissions—Worcester, Massachusetts's American Antiquarian Society goes unmentioned, unaccountably—Achim's commendable accomplishment adds many details and nuances. Octavio Paz wrote in 1970 that the National Anthropology Museum could be understood as an elegant justification of an authoritarian government, in which “anthropology and history have been made to serve an idea … and that idea is the foundation, the buried and immovable base, that sustains our conception of the state, of political power, and of social order.” Achim's sophisticated study reveals that far from immovable and eternal, that foundation was for many decades a highly precarious construction begun under the most adverse circumstances.
