Preserving the Ephemeral: the International Museum Day 2004 in Mexico

This paper analyses the process by which intangible heritage has gradually been integrated into the conservationists’ awareness. Intangible heritage, whose creative products are expressed in skills, knowledge, and representations, constitutes a challenge for museums, which were conceived, from their start, around the value of objects. Even when these spaces have previously acknowledged the importance of intangible cultural expressions, they have rarely performed the tasks of collecting, conserving, or displaying this kind of heritage. The prevailing perspective in Mexican museums is, to this day, to present them only as part of a ‘glorious past’ –before the Spaniards’ arrival to the continent–so that only recently have museum professionals become interested in the vast amount of traditional knowledge, skills, and activities that indigenous peoples still keep alive, more than 500 years after the Conquest. The conservation of cultural diversity implies not only the sampling of a few customs or artistic expressions that dominant groups consider valuable, but rather the formulation of government and social programs which ensure the continuity of ways of life, customs, and a sustainable relationship with the environment which created a given culture.