Arquivos e Memórias

Today I finally began to study natural history museums and history of science fulltime (whilst and on the same time being unemployed). I am currently dedicated to the Historical Archives of the Zoological and Antropological Department at the National Natural History Museum, Lisbon.
I have been bewitched since 2006 by the collections of this department - and of all natural history museums -, its material culture and its meanings that are so much more close to culture and politics than they are to science.
Until now I gathered a lot of data and came across some some times crazy peculiarities. Now that I am unemployed I'll start writing and hopefully publishing some of the stories I found underlying in the rooms, the walls, the corridors and the objects that are the history of this museum.


In the Historical Archive, I found a lot of interesting manuscripts, not about science, but rather about the relationships between professors and the government, or between the museum directors and their correspondents abroad over the last 150 years. The history of the collections goes further back in history, but I have maintained a special interest in the biography of these collections since they came into the building they still are today. This building is the old Polytechnical School of Lisbon, at the time that it was working at full speed this was one of the main education sites in Lisbon. More on that later on. 


In 2008, I gathered all the information I could get from this Historical Archive on the exhibitions practices at the Zoology and Antropology Section of the Polytechnical School (later this section is called Museu Bocage in tribute to its first director - I rather like this designation, and I will be using it often as a substitute for the average of 7 words you need to say before anyone can understand what you are talking about. Its rather confusing that a part of the collections in the national museum may also be addressed as a museum, but that's what  and how it was).
There isn't much precise data to be found in this historic archive [AHMB - Arquivo Histórico do Museu Bocage] on exhibitions, because there weren't any exhibitions until very recently, okay in the last 150 years there were a lot of exhibition rooms but were they visited? Not as such and even when opened to the public, not very often. 
I could also gather from some Lisbon Guides from the 19th century and early 20th century that this museum in the university was open to the public of Lisbon only one day per week, thursdays it seems, continuing the tradition set by the Science Academy Museum [same collections, a few years earlier], which also opened on thurdays if at all.


So the university museum paradigm is also at play here. Rooms filled with magnificent naturalized mammals or drawers filled with rocks and crystals existed. Even display cases existed. But for the main purpose of the ongoing study of the natural world.


(to be continued)