Museums in the Construction of National Identity in Twentieth Century Mexico and Turkey

In this dissertation I investigate The National Museum of Anthropology (NMA) in Mexico, and the Museum of Painting and Sculpture (MPS) in Turkey to examine the important role they played in the construction and projection of a national identity that at once looked to past traditions while at the same time engaging with and aspiring to the internationalism of modernity in the mid-twentieth century. In the twentieth century, these nations shared some common features in that they were reevaluating their histories to address significant political and social changes such as the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the 1923 establishment of the Turkish Republic. These political and social transformations had an effect on the arts and arts institutions and leadership in each country made use of the arts to advance their political agenda of crafting a coherent nation that attempted to fuse competing social factions and achieving international status often times through modernization policies that were on many occasions synonymous with westernization, especially in Turkey. Despite these similarities each country faced specific, historically contingent issues and thus arrived some different responses to similar historical and political circumstances. In this dissertation I address these responses through two case studies focused a study of two major museums in each country the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, and the Museum of Painting and Sculpture in Turkey. First, I present the historical backgrounds of each of these museums before their establishment. Second, I examine how each deployed marked national historical tradition to craft narratives of national identity at critical moments in each of country’s engagement with modernity. Finally, while these countries read their histories in their own ways, this study creates a connection between the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, and the Museum of Painting and Sculpture in Turkey, to attempt to identify broader patterns of how the arts and arts institutions were used in “developing” nations during the twentieth century.