Elites locais, dominação social e invisibilidades: a construção da memória oficial no Museu Histórico Municipal de Palmas (PR)

Museums are institutions authorized to produce and project “legitimate” representations of the past, social groups, and historical characters. This study analyzes the process of construction and representation of official memory at the Professor José Alexandre Vieira Municipal Historical Museum, created in 1979 in the municipality of Palmas (PR). This study analyzes the official representation of the contribution of several social groups — ethnic-racial groups, families, ruling political class, economic segments, etc. — to the socio-historical formation of the municipality, the place they occupy in the museum space, and the relevance for local history they acquire in the narrative conveyed by the museum. This study analyzed the expographic narrative of the museum, reconstructing it by ethnographic incursions into the exhibition route, and carried out a documentary research in the historical archive available at the institution. This research found that the Palmas Museum fits as a symbolic investment strategy that operates as a mechanism for reproducing the domination of local elites who mobilize memory as a resource to symbolically reproduce their social domination, by the social consecration of great families and the election of great characters who compose the historical pantheon of the municipality. The social reproduction of local elites and relationships of domination in the universe of memory and the symbolic imply the invisibility and erasure of social groups that have been historically dominated in the local context, especially Indigenous groups and populations of African origin.