Our Indigenous Ancestors: A Cultural History of Museums, Science, and Identity in Argentina, 1877–1943

Cultural analyses and historical studies of museums have proliferated in recent years. These institutions and their directors, objects, and curation, as well as their audiences, all provide different lenses to study science, nationalism, and identity, among other topics. Carolyne Larson's work strives to weave many of these elements together, to varying degrees, to challenge a still prominent assumption that Argentina is first and foremost a creole, European nation with precious little of an indigenous past, let alone present, relative to other regions of Latin America. Larson argues in the introduction that while many Argentines constructed a “‘white’ or creole Argentina, they also helped create strategic and possessive connections with Argentina's indigenous heritage in the scientific and public spaces of museums, as well as newspapers and magazines, schoolrooms and congressional sessions, public monuments and antiquities markets” (pp. 6–7). Through a brief introduction and epilogue as well as four substantive chapters, Larson...