ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the uses of tradition in devices of contemporary exhibition in Mexico. It makes a counterpoint between the narrative of the ethnographic halls of the National Museum of Anthropology (NMA) and some community museums that emerged from the National Program of Communitarian Museums (NPCM), created halfway through the 1990s. The chapter uses the notion of incorporation as a hand down effective image of the extension of territorial power as a result of warlike action, which morphs into the 'hospitable' image of the modern state that always allows another filiation among its ranks. It refers to the necessity of converting the problem of the history of differences produced by coloniality of power. The chapter also refers to the exercise of the postcolonial tutelary powers into a presentational celebration of the cultures in difference. Ranajit Guha proposes that in the representation of the colonial-national hegemonic discourse, the other always has the form of a past.
