Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

This paper is part of an ongoing doctoral research taking place in the Programme of Anthropology: Politics and Displays of Culture and Museology in Portugal. My current research reflects on the processes of musealization, appropriation and re-qualification of a set of symbolic sites of the former portuguese dictatorship (1926-1974). For this specific paper, I intend to reflect on the fieldwork done at the Aljube Museum – Resistance and Freedom opened in Lisbon in the year of 2015, a musealized former political prison which reflects on the portuguese dictatorship and its resistance. During fieldwork, I attended more than two dozens of guided visits and interviewed, afterwards, a group of different visitors (as well as, at a different time, a group of former political prisoners of that same site and members of civic associations of preservation of memory). Therefore, this discussion reflects on the engagement, emotions, discourses, and subjective perceptions related to the visit of this site and to the heritage-making processes – or their absences – of this recent past.