| This dissertation engages long-standing narratives of Argentine historiography, by tracing the impact of museum anthropology on Argentine society during the formative late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring connections between indigenous cultures and Argentine national identity. While much existing historiography frames Argentina's nation-state formation during this period in terms of debates surrounding the emergence of a dominant myth of "national whiteness," this same period also witnessed the appearance of state-funded anthropology museums focusing specifically on the study of Argentina's indigenous peoples in the past and present. This dissertation contends that through museum anthropology, non-indigenous Argentines embraced indigenous cultures---strategically and possessively---as part of their national heritage, complicating the myth of "national whiteness," and prompting historians to ask new questions about Argentine race, nation, science, and identity.;The dissertation explores how non-indigenous Argentines constructed and expressed their own connection to a national indigenous heritage, over whose meaning they battled inside and outside of museums. Struggles for control over scientific understandings---and possession---of indigenous peoples in Argentina's past and present were diverse and inter-regional. Therefore, this study focuses on four case study museums (in Buenos Aires, La Plata, and in Tucuman), emphasizing site-specific factors and dynamic webs of inter-regional interaction. Using a variety of archival and published sources, this dissertation argues that through museum anthropology, scientists, politicians, and a broad spectrum of other Argentines transformed museums into spaces of social negotiation and participation, and turned anthropology into a "national" science. To draw out the full implications of this conclusion, the dissertation analyzes not only the inner workings of museums, but also the work of museum anthropologists as cultural mediators, and re-deployments of anthropological symbols, ideas, and objects beyond the museum, in public monuments, newspapers, and marketplaces. |
