Resumen de Una aproximación al coleccionismo de Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna,1879 - 1884: guerra, civilización e identidad nacional
This article seeks to reconstruct the process by which a group of assorted Peruvian documents was transported to Chile during the years in which Lima was occupied (1881 - 1883). Most of these documents ended up in the impressive private collection of the renowned politician, historian, and publicist Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna. This article also discusses to what extent the transportation of cultural artifacts from one capital city to another one - and from a national repository to private hands - is connected to the civilizing discourse of the Chilean bourgeois intelligentsia, of which Vicuña Mackenna was probably the leading representative. The war allowed Vicuña Mackenna to fulfill the dream of every nineteenth-century collector: to increase its exclusive collection with one-of-a-kind items. The conflict with Peru also created the conditions for the Chilean bourgeoisie to strengthen its civilizing discourse by appropriating those cultural artifacts that contradicted the allegedly barbarous nature of their enemies. The international conflict that frames my analysis, thus, is no longer seen as a mere military event and becomes one of revealing ethnographic connotations: the degradation of the enemy and the mutilation of its historical memory were directly connected with the consolidation of a Chilean national identity that, by affirming its superiority, justified its "civilizing mission".
